y.

But after eleven o'clock the wind first rose, and then shifted a little,
and then blew light but steady; and then at last she heeled and the
water spoke under her bows, and still she heeled and ran, until in the
haze I could see no more land; but ever so far out there were no seas,
for the light full breeze was with the tide, the tide ebbing out as a
strong, and silent as a man in anger, down the hidden parallel valleys
of the narrow sea. And I held this little wind till about two o'clock,
when I drank wine and ate bread and meat at the tiller, for I had them
by me, and just afterwards, still through a thick haze of heat, I saw
Gris-nez, a huge ghost, right up against and above me; and I wondered,
for I had crossed the Channel, now for the first time, and knew now what
it felt like to see new land.

Though I knew nothing of the place, I had this much sense, that I said
to myself: "The tide is right-down Channel, racing through the hidden
valleys under the narrow sea, so it will all go down together and all
come up together, and the flood will come on this foreign side much at
the same hour that it does on the home side." My boat lay to the east
and the ebb tide held her down, and I lit a pipe and looked at the
French hills and thought about them and the people in them, and England
which I had left behind, and I was delighted with the loneliness of the
sea; and still I waited for the flood.

But in a little while the chain made a rattling noise, and she lay
quite slack and swung oddly; and then there were little boiling and
eddying places in the water, and the water seemed to come up from
underneath sometimes, and altogether it behaved very strangely, and this
was the turn of the tide. Then the wind dropped also, and for a moment
she lollopped about, till at last, after I had gone below and
straightened things, I came on deck to see that she had turned
completely round, and that the tide at last was making up my way,
towards Calais, and her chain was taut and her nose pointed down
Channel, and a little westerly breeze, a little draught of air, came up
cool along the tide.

When this came I was very glad, for I saw that I could end my adventure
before night. So I pulled up the anchor and fished it, and then turned
with the tide under me, and the slight half-felt breeze just barely
filling the mainsail (the sheet was slack, so powerless was the wind),
and I ran up along that high coast, watching eagerly every new t