anic flights.

And as he had always fled from everything that disturbed and
irritated him, so now, in the very middle of an English summer and a
London season, he was flying from the sound of his own fame. Not far
this time; only from the center to the verge, from Piccadilly
pavement to the south coast. He had hired a small cutter for a
month, and lived on board in much physical discomfort and
intellectual peace. He hardly knew it by sight, that beautiful full
face of his own country; but he was learning to know it as he sailed
from the white cliffs to the red, from the red to the gray and
black, the iron slopes and precipices of the Land's End.

He had just returned from a fortnight's cruise, and was wondering
what he would do with the weeks that remained to him--whether he
would explore the west coast of England or set sail for the Channel
Islands--when he found himself, very lazy and very happy, lying at
anchor in a certain white-walled harbor in the south of Cornwall. A
neighboring regatta had carried off, the fleet of yachts that had
their moorings there, and the harbor was dotted with fishing-boats,
pilot-boats, ocean steamers, steam tugs, wherries, and such craft.
The little _Torch_, rocking madly on miniature waves as she played
with her chain, was almost alone in her lightness and frivolity.
About an hour before midnight Durant woke in his berth, and felt
this vivacity of hers increasing; larger waves lapped her and broke
against her sides, but overhead, on deck, there was no sign of a
wind. He got up, climbed the companion ladder, and put his head out
over the hatch. A schooner yacht had come in, and lay straining at
her cable in the narrow channel between the _Torch_ and a Portsmouth
pilot. She had only just put into harbor, for her crew were still
busy taking down her sails. As if it were her own movement alone
that made her visible, she swayed there, dimly discerned, while she
slipped her white canvas like a beauty disrobing in the dark, sail
by sail, till she stood naked under a veil of dusk, and the light
went up above her bows.

A restless thing that schooner yacht; her canvas was hardly lowered
before it was up again. She had not long lain dreaming, passive to
the will of the tide. At sunrise she awoke, and what with her own
swinging and vibration, and the voices and trampling of her joyous,
red-capped, blue-jerseyed crew, there was no sleep for anyone in her
neighborhood after three o'clock. So Dur