large and small, between the milky, curdled
clouds--Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a thousand
shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful olive-green
that tarnished into a rich bronze-green.

During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of
pink, and blue, and pale green, and yellow. A little later, when the sun
was quite down, in the background of the curdled clouds smouldered a wine-
red mass of colour, that faded to bronze and tinged all the fading greens
with its sanguinary hue. The clouds themselves flushed to rose of all
shades, while a fan of gigantic streamers of pale rose radiated toward
the zenith. These deepened rapidly into flaunting rose-flame and burned
long in the slow-closing twilight.

And with all this wonder of the beauty of the world still glowing in my
brain hours afterward, I hear the snarling of Mr. Pike above my head, and
the trample and drag of feet as the men move from rope to rope and pull
and haul. More weather is making, and from the way sail is being taken
in it cannot be far off.

* * * * *

Yet at daylight this morning we were still wallowing in the same dead
calm and sickly swell. Miss West says the barometer is down, but that
the warning has been too long, for the Plate, to amount to anything.
Pamperos happen quickly here, and though the _Elsinore_, under bare poles
to her upper-topsails, is prepared for anything, it may well be that they
will be crowding on canvas in another hour.

Mr. Pike was so fooled that he actually had set the topgallant-sails, and
the gaskets were being taken off the royals, when the Samurai came on
deck, strolled back and forth a casual five minutes, then spoke in an
undertone to Mr. Pike. Mr. Pike did not like it. To me, a tyro, it was
evident that he disagreed with his master. Nevertheless, his voice went
out in a snarl aloft to the men on the royal-yards to make all fast
again. Then it was clewlines and buntlines and lowering of yards as the
topgallant-sails were stripped off. The crojack was taken in, and some
of the outer fore-and-aft handsails, whose order of names I can never
remember.

A breeze set in from the south-west, blowing briskly under a clear sky. I
could see that Mr. Pike was secretly pleased. The Samurai had been
mistaken. And each time Mr. Pike glanced aloft at the naked topgallant-
and royal-yards, I knew his thought was that they might well be carrying
sail. I wa