underbred and grinning schoolboy, we had no sooner worn ship than the
wind began to abate.

For myself, however, I did but exchange anxieties. I was no sooner out
of one fear than I fell upon another; no sooner secure that I should
myself make the intended haven, than I began to be convinced that Trent
was there before me. I climbed into the rigging, stood on the board, and
eagerly scanned that ring of coral reef and bursting breaker, and the
blue lagoon which they enclosed. The two islets within began to show
plainly--Middle Brooks and Lower Brooks Island, the Directory named
them: two low, bush-covered, rolling strips of sand, each with
glittering beaches, each perhaps a mile or a mile and a half in length,
running east and west, and divided by a narrow channel. Over these,
innumerable as maggots, there hovered, chattered, screamed and clanged,
millions of twinkling sea-birds: white and black; the black by far the
largest. With singular scintillations, this vortex of winged life swayed
to and fro in the strong sunshine, whirled continually through itself,
and would now and again burst asunder and scatter as wide as the lagoon:
so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular
convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the
adjacent sea--the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions.
And a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and
centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her
sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag
that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main--the
Flying Scud, the fruit of so many toilers, a recollection in so many
lives of men, whose tall spars had been mirrored in the remotest corners
of the sea--lay stationary at last and forever, in the first stage of
naval dissolution. Towards her, the taut Norah Creina, vulture-wise,
wriggled to windward: come from so far to pick her bones. And, look as
I pleased, there was no other presence of man or of man's handiwork;
no Honolulu schooner lay there crowded with armed rivals, no smoke rose
from the fire at which I fancied Trent cooking a meal of sea-birds. It
seemed, after all, we were in time, and I drew a mighty breath.

I had not arrived at this reviving certainty before the breakers were
already close aboard, the leadsman at his station, and the captain
posted in the fore cross-trees to con us through the coral l