olds of diaphanous night, its riding lights
following us like eyes. In the horny light of that winter dawn we
overhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, the
Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern. We made a
course east by north to where the red glints of the Maplin and Gunfleet
lights winked in their iron gibbets. Above the shallows of the Burrows
Shoal the masts projected awry of the wreck of a three-masted schooner,
and they could have been the fingers of the drowned making a last clutch
at nothing.

We got abreast of Orfordness, and went through the gate of the North
Channel upon a wide grey plain. We were fairly at sea. We were out.
The _Windhover_, being free, I suppose, began to dance. The sun came up.
The seas were on the march. Just behind us was London, asleep and
unsuspecting under the brown depression of its canopy; and as to this
surprise of light and space so near to that city, so easily entered, yet
for so long merely an ancient rumour, an old tale of our streets to which
the ships and the wharves gave credence--how shall the report of it sound
true? Not at all, except to those who still hold to a faith, through all
foul times, in the chance hints of a better world.

A new time was beginning in such a world. There was a massive purple
battlement on the sea, at a great distance, the last entrenchment of
night; but a multitude of rays had stormed it, poured through clefts and
chasms in the wall, and escaped to the _Windhover_ on a broad road that
was newly laid from the sky to this planet. The sun was at one end of
the road, and we were at the other. There were only the two of us on
that road. On our port beam the shadow which was East Anglia became
suddenly that bright shore which is sometimes conjectured, but is never
reached.

The _Windhover_ drove athwart the morning, and her bows would ride over
the horizon to divide it, and then the skyline joined again as she sank
below it. We were beginning to live. I did not know what the skipper
would think of it, so I did not cheer. Sometimes the sea did this for
me, making a loud applause as it leaped over the prow. The trawler was a
good ship; you could feel that. She was as easy and buoyant as a
thoroughbred. She would take a wave in a stride. I liked her start of
surprise when she met a wave of unexpected speed and strength, and then
leaped at it, and threw it, white and shouting, all around us. It