,' I said. 'But if I were you, I should
bring her round in circles outside here until daylight comes.' And there
he stayed, steering round in circles all night."

The ship was reckoned, by those in higher authority, to do ten knots
to the hour, but for a week or so her average was no more than eight.
This circumstance was never far away from our table-talk. The playful
interrogative "Ten?" would welcome Phillips to his place at dinner, as
the second mate handed him the slip giving the results of the midday
observations.

As the ship's officers and the sailors became better used to me, and
I to them, my voyage began to assume its intended holiday character. The
southward progress of the _Bonadventure_, disappoint her chief engineer
as she might, was felt in the improving weather; and as sea weather was
still a new world to me, I was never for long without some variation of
amusement. The colours of the rainbow in the waves leaping up at the
ship's side and in the veils of spray that they flung to the whisking
wind were soon reflecting themselves in my remembrance. On dark blue
ridge of surly water and on snowy coronal, the broken arc of the rainbow
was for ever flickering, just beyond the uncertain shadow of the ship.
The lively wind, meanwhile, as if by a sudden stronger impulse, would
whirl the green toppling seas over the lower deck, and the light cold
spray as high as the bridge. Here, I thought, was a lyric indeed; and
so, it looked, thought the gulls that disported about the ships, and
the shoals that, I fancied, like those of any small stream, would be up to
enjoy the sun.

Swabbing was going on aboard at a great pace. The boatswain, a sort
of combined walrus and carpenter, seldom allowed his swabbers and his
hosepipe to rest. The flow of dirty water from the cabin roofs made the
deck dangerous ground. So perish all accumulated dust! The _Bonadventure_
began to look clean, even resplendent.

When Hosea joined the merchant service, he tells me, old hands would
often make a disparaging comment upon the decline of sailing days. "I'm
giving up going to sea. I'm going in steamers." True, in the very names of
the old sails, up to their skyscrapers and their moonrakers, there
lingers yet the elemental dignity of the earlier sort of argosy. Even
the same metaphorical fountain of description seems to have ceased to
flow with the falling asleep of the famous clippers: and I doubt whether
the author of _London River_, th