ea turned (as
with the instinct of the homing pigeon) for the vast receptacle, swept
eddying through the gates, was transmuted, as it did so, into a wonder
of watery and silken hues, and brimmed into the inland sea beyond. The
schooner looked up close-hauled, and was caught and carried away by the
influx like a toy. She skimmed; she flew; a momentary shadow touched her
decks from the shoreside trees; the bottom of the channel showed up for
a moment and was in a moment gone; the next, she floated on the bosom of
the lagoon, and below, in the transparent chamber of waters, a myriad of
many-coloured fishes were sporting, a myriad pale flowers of coral
diversified the floor.

Herrick stood transported. In the gratified lust of his eye he forgot
the past and the present; forgot that he was menaced by a prison on the
one hand and starvation on the other; forgot that he was come to that
island, desperately foraging, clutching at expedients. A drove of
fishes, painted like the rainbow and billed like parrots, hovered up in
the shadow of the schooner, and passed clear of it, and glinted in the
submarine sun. They were beautiful, like birds, and their silent passage
impressed him like a strain of song.

Meanwhile, to the eye of Davis in the cross-trees, the lagoon continued
to expand its empty waters, and the long succession of the shoreside
trees to be paid out like fishing-line off a reel. And still there was
no mark of habitation. The schooner, immediately on entering, had been
kept away to the nor'ard where the water seemed to be the most deep; and
she was now skimming past the tall grove of trees, which stood on that
side of the channel and denied further view. Of the whole of the low
shores of the island only this bight remained to be revealed. And
suddenly the curtain was raised; they began to open out a haven, snugly
elbowed there, and beheld, with an astonishment beyond words, the roofs
of men.

The appearance, thus "instantaneously disclosed" to those on the deck of
the _Farallone_, was not that of a city, rather of a substantial country
farm with its attendant hamlet: a long line of sheds and store-houses;
apart, upon the one side, a deep-verandah'd dwelling-house; on the
other, perhaps a dozen native huts; a building with a belfry and some
rude offer at architectural features that might be thought to mark it
out for a chapel; on the beach in front some heavy boats drawn up, and a
pile of timber running forth into t