e red ball of the sun. But to-day, as hour after hour
went by with the pant of the engines, the lift and slide of the Atlantic
swell, the tonic wind humming against the stays, my eyes grew heavy, and
at length my head dropped against my father's shoulder. And then--to me
it seemed the next instant--he woke me up and pointed towards the
islands as they rose out of the indigo sea. At first they looked rather
like low-lying clouds, but after a minute or two there was no mistaking
them; for, as if they had just discovered _us_, they hung out lamp after
lamp, some steady, some intermittent, but all of them gleaming yellow
along the floor of the sea save one, a crimson light which hid and
showed itself again northward of the rest. Crimson was my favourite
colour in those days, and even as I dropped back into sleep I decided
that I liked this lamp the best of all.

I awoke again to the sound of voices. We were passing a pilot-boat out
there on the watch for ships. Her crew hailed us as we went by, and I
saw their faces in the green radiance of our starboard light--gaunt,
dark faces, altogether foreign. One of the men, the oldest, was
bareheaded, with long grey locks, and wore a yellow neckcloth with his
shirt open below it, and his naked chest showing. Their voices as they
answered our skipper were clear and gay like the voices of children.

And, next, we were alongside a quay. Our seats, our bulwarks, even our
decks, shone with dew. A crowd stood on the dim quay-edge and looked
down on us, and chattered, but in soft voices. There was a policeman
too, and I wondered how _he_ came there. Above this shadowy moving
crowd rode the stars I had known at home. I took my father's hand. At
the head of the gangway he stooped, hoisted me on his shoulders, and
carried me up and up through narrow mysterious streets, around dark
corners, past belated islanders hurrying down to the steamer; but always
upward, until he pushed open a door and set me down blinking in a
whitewashed bedroom lit by a couple of candles: and with that came
sleep.

Happy days followed: blue and white days--days vaulted and floored with
blue, flashing with white granite, with the rush of white water beneath
the shadow of the leaning sail, with white cirrus clouds, with white
wings of seabirds. It was the height of the nesting season, and the
birds had brought us to the islands; my father with paint-box and
camera--though, our time being short, he reli