hen "Home, Sweet
Home." There followed an astonishing amount of laughter from a hidden
audience. The prisoners in the neighbouring cells were there after all,
and were even jolly. The day thereafter was mute, the yellow walls at
evening deepened to ochre, to umber, and became black, except where our
riding lights made luminous circles. Each miserable watcher who came
down to the saloon that night, muffled and sparkling with frost, to get a
drink of hot coffee, just drank it, and went on deck again without a word.

The motes next morning went drifting leisurely on the same light air,
interminable. Our prison appeared even narrower. Then once again a
clearance was imagined. Our skipper thought he saw a lane along the
River, and up-anchored. The noise of our cable awoke a tumult of
startled bells.

Ours was a perishable cargo. We were much overdue. Our skipper was
willing to take any risk--what a good master mariner would call a
reasonable risk--to get home; and so, when a deck hand, on the third
morning, with the thawing fog dripping from his moustache, appeared in
the saloon with the news that it was clearing a little, the master
decided he would go.

I then saw, from the deck of the _Windhover_, so strange a vision that it
could not be related to this lower sphere of ours. It could be thought
that dawn's bluish twilight radiated from the _Windhover_. We were the
luminary, and our faint aura revealed, through the melting veil, an outer
world that had no sky, no plane, no bounds. It was void. There was no
River, except that small oval of glass on which rested our ship, like a
model.

The universe, which that morning had only begun to form in the void, was
grouped about us. This was the original of mornings. We were its
gravitational point. It was inert and voiceless. It was pregnant with
unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms.
Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another
life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of the
dawn, were beyond remembrance and recognition. The _Windhover_ alone was
substantial and definite. But placed about us, suspended in a night that
was growing translucent, were the shadows of what might once have been
ships, perhaps were ships to be, but were then steamers and sailers
without substance, waiting some creative word, shrouded spectres that had
left the wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyage