ough I liked your looks from the first.'

It was in the trade-winds, at night, under a velvety, bespangled sky; a
great multitude of stars watching the shadows of the sea gleaming
mysteriously in the wake of the ship; while the leisurely swishing of
the water to leeward was like a drowsy comment on her progress. Mr
Powell expressed his satisfaction by a half-bashful laugh. The mate
mused on: `And of course you haven't known the ship as she used to be.
She was more than a home to a man. She was not like any other ship; and
Captain Anthony was not like any other master to sail with. Neither is
she now. But before one never had a care in the world as to her--and as
to him, too. No, indeed, there was never anything to worry about.'

Young Powell couldn't see what there was to worry about even then. The
serenity of the peaceful night seemed as vast as all space, and as
enduring as eternity itself. It's true the sea is an uncertain element,
but no sailor remembers this in the presence of its bewitching power any
more than a lover ever thinks of the proverbial inconstancy of women.
And Mr Powell, being young, thought naively that the captain being
married, there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition. I
suppose that to him life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others,
was something still in the nature of a fairy-tale with a `they lived
happy ever after' termination. We are the creatures of our light
literature much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides
itself on being scientific and practical, and in possession of
incontrovertible theories. Powell felt in that way the more because the
captain of a ship at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something
like a prince of a fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody,
not to be called to account except by powers practically invisible and
so distant, that they might well be looked upon as supernatural for all
that the rest of the crew knows of them, as a rule.

"So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate--or rather
he understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which did not
seem to him adequate. He would have dismissed all this out of his mind
with a contemptuous: `What the devil do I care?' if the captain's wife
herself had not been so young. To see her the first time had been
something of a shock to him. He had some preconceived ideas as to
captain's wives which, while he did not believe t