to dress for breakfast.

The calm that had now fallen upon us lasted unbroken for five full days,
during which we sweltered, day and night, in the melting heat of the
tropics, with the blazing sun right overhead every day at noon, and a
waning moon soaring into the heavens later and still later each night to
render the hours of darkness magical with the witchery of her beauty and
mystery. And during the whole of this time we never shifted our
position by so much as a single mile a day. At length, however, on the
sixth day, a few cat's-paws came playing at intervals over the surface
of the glass-smooth water, momentarily ruffling it into little
evanescent patches of tender blue, and causing a transient ripple to
play over the stagnant cloths of our canvas. As the day wore on the
cat's-paws increased in frequency, in area, and in strength; and shortly
before sundown a gentle, dainty little air of wind came stealing softly
up from the eastward, to woo which we joyfully spread every rag of
canvas we could show to it: and oh! how ineffably pleasant and
delightful was the sound of the first faint liquid tinkling ripple that
broke from our cutwater, and gushed gently past the bends in a stream of
tiny bursting air-bells, as the beautifully moulded hull yielded to the
faint impulse of the soft breathing and began to move under it with the
languorous motion of a sleeping swan! Then, as the soft, warm,
star-spangled darkness of the tropics closed down upon us and wrapped us
within its impalpable folds, the breeze gathered strength and weight by
imperceptible degrees, until the scarcely audible tinkle under the bows
merged into the sound of a knife shearing through a tautly stretched
silken web, with a musical fountain-like plashing at the cutwater and a
crisp, gushing curl of the glassy wave under the lee bow as it broke and
hurried past into our wake in a lacework of creamy swirling froth,
gemmed with countless glittering foam-bubbles; while the log told us
that the ship was slipping her way through the small wrinklings of the
brine at a speed of fully six knots in the hour.

By-and-by the moon--her orb now reduced to less than half its full
dimensions--stole ghostlike above the horizon; and by her wan light we
saw that a host of soft, fleecy clouds--shaped like the smoke belched
from the mouth of a cannon upon a windless day--were mustering their
squadrons in the eastern quarter; and we knew them for the welcome
trade-clou