ere
was such depth to this red! And, below it, separated from the main
colour-mass by a line of gray-white fog, or line of sea, was another and
smaller streak of ruddy-coloured wine.

I strolled across the poop to the port side.

"Oh! Come back! Look! Look!" Miss West cried to me.

"What's the use?" I answered. "I've something just as good over here."

She joined me, and as she did so I noted, a sour grin on Mr. Pike's face.

The eastern heavens were equally spectacular. That quarter of the sky
was sheer and delicate shell of blue, the upper portions of which faded,
changed, through every harmony, into a pale, yet warm, rose, all
trembling, palpitating, with misty blue tinting into pink. The
reflection of this coloured sky-shell upon the water made of the sea a
glimmering watered silk, all changeable, blue, Nile-green, and salmon-
pink. It was silky, silken, a wonderful silk that veneered and flossed
the softly moving, wavy water.

And the pale moon looked like a wet pearl gleaming through the tinted
mist of the sky-shell.

In the southern quadrant of the sky we discovered an entirely different
sunset--what would be accounted a very excellent orange-and-red sunset
anywhere, with grey clouds hanging low and lighted and tinted on all
their under edges.

"Huh!" Mr. Pike muttered gruffly, while we were exclaiming over our fresh
discovery. "Look at the sunset I got here to the north. It ain't doing
so badly now, I leave it to you."

And it wasn't. The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and
cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the
horizon to the zenith. It was all amazing. Four sunsets at the one time
in the sky! Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with a sunset
distinctly its own.

And as the colours dulled in the slow twilight, the moon, still misty,
wept tears of brilliant, heavy silver into the dim lilac sea. And then
came the hush of darkness and the night, and we came to ourselves, out of
reverie, sated with beauty, leaning toward each other as we leaned upon
the rail side by side.

* * * * *

I never grow tired of watching Captain West. In a way he bears a sort of
resemblance to several of Washington's portraits. He is six feet of
aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and stately
grace of movement. His thinness is almost ascetic. In appearance and
manner he is the perfect old-type New England gentleman.

He has the same