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; but you comes along and gets aboard of us eight hunderd mile away, and--says you--`we'll sight Saint Paul as we runs down our eastin''; and, although we've been headin' all round the compass since then, there's the hiland, right enough, and just where you said it would be, ay, to the very hinch." I was vastly tickled at the man's enthusiastic admiration of my little twopenny-halfpenny feat of navigation, and--secretly--very proud of it myself; but, of course, in reality it was an exceedingly commonplace exploit, which any other navigator worthy of being so-called could have accomplished without the slightest difficulty, the only essentials to success being good instruments, clear skies, and correct arithmetic, all of which I fortunately possessed. But I was nevertheless highly elated at my success, chiefly, I think, because, it being my first independent attempt to navigate a ship, I had demonstrated to myself my ability to do so. The day now grew fast in the east; the primrose hue softened away, right and left, into a tint of warm grey with a faint suggestion of rose in it; the stars had all vanished save one solitary gem that hung low in the western sky like a silver lamp; the zenith was a rich, pure ultramarine, that was fast spreading toward the western horizon and chasing the last lingering shadow of night before it. Great spokes of radiant light were darting aloft from behind the island and touching into gold a few small, scattered flakes of fleecy cloud that floated high over our mastheads. Then, all in a moment, the small, faintly- gleaming bit of land ahead became transformed, as it might be with a magician's wand, into a block of deepest, richest purple, bristling with rays of burning gold, a throbbing rim of molten gold swept into view from behind it, and in an instant it vanished amid a blinding blaze of sunlight that flashed across the ocean toward us, transfiguring its erstwhile surface of ebony into a tremble of turquoise and gold, outlining every spar and sail and rope in the ship with thin, golden wires, and causing every bit of glass and polished metal-work to blaze and scintillate with golden fire. The watch appeared, yawning and stretching as they emerged from their hiding places, blinking like owls as they stared over the bows endeavouring to pick out from the dazzle ahead the shape of land that the lookout was pointing to; and the carpenter emerged from his reverie to shout: "Rig the he
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