more numerous and patent than ever, in such a light? Not in the
least. For I myself had long since given up washing, as a laborious and
unsatisfactory process, and was then cutting up cake tobacco with the
rapture of an acolyte preparing the incense. If this was what was meant
by getting lost on the Dogger, then the method, if only its magic could
be formulated, would make the fortunes of the professional fakirs of
happiness in the capitals of the rich. Yet mornings of such a quality
cannot be purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of virtue.

On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic. The wind
was steady and generous. The warm sunlight danced. I should not have
been surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the
greatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek,
smiling with approval of the scene below--melancholy approval, for we
would remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale and
sickly when Paul, that argumentative zealot, came to provide a world,
already thinking more of industry and State politics than of the gods,
with a hard-wearing theology which would last till Manchester came. For
the _Windhover_ had drifted into a time and place as innocent of man's
highest achievements as is joy of death. The wind and sea were chanting.
The riding of the ship kept time to that measure. The vault was
turquoise, and the moving floor was cobalt. The white islands of the
Olympians were in the sky.

Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, with
nothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over from
earth's earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in the
north. That cloud did not rise. It blew towards us straight over the
seas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail,
heading east of south of us. She was, when at a distance, a baffling
mass of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed. She
got abeam of us. Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper to
give grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the ship
of romance, and in such a time and place. She was a cloud that, when it
mounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into the
meridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mist
blown forward on the wind. She might have risen at any moment. Her
green hull had the sheer of a sea