l, to be so often part of
the sky, and to shroud without obscuring the empty distances of our
seas. There was a hard clear light to the north; and even over the
Downs, low as they were upon the horizon, there was a sharp belt of
blue. I saw the sun strike the white walls of Lady Newburgh's Folly, and
I saw, what had hitherto been all confused, the long line of the Arundel
Woods contrasting with the plain. Then the boom went over to port, the
jib filled, I felt the helm pulling steadily for the first time in so
many hours, and the boat responded. The wind was on me; and though it
was from the north, that wind was warm, for it came from the sheltered
hills.

Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few moments, which had so
little to do with the art of sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of
the full life that goes with the governing of sails and rudders. For one
thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind--and
the boat made three. There was work to be done in pressing against the
tiller and in bringing her up to meet the seas, small though they were,
for my boat was also small. Life came into everything; the Channel leapt
and (because the wind was across the tide) the little waves broke in
small white tips: in their movement and my own, in the dance of the boat
and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that
caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free
streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from
the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the
water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the
humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was
exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million faces of the waves
made, music rather than laughter, and the energy which this first warmth
of the year had spread all over the Channel and shore, while it made
life one, seemed also to make it innumerable. We were now not only
three, the wind and my boat and I; we were all part (and masters for the
moment) of a great throng. I knew them all by their names, which I had
learnt a long time ago, and had sung of them in the North Sea. I have
often written them down. I will not be ashamed to repeat them here, for
good things never grow old. There was the Wave that brings good tidings,
and the Wave that breaks on the shore, and the Wave of the island, and
the Wave that helps, and the Wave that