The schooner was cast off before I got on deck.  In the misty obscurity of the first dawn, I saw the tug heading us with glowing fires and blowing smoke, and heard her beat the roughened waters of the bay.  Beside us, on her flock of hills, the lighted city towered up and stood swollen in the raw fog.  It was strange to see her burn on thus wastefully, with half-quenched luminaries, when the dawn was already grown strong enough to show me, and to suffer me to recognise, a solitary figure standing by the piles.

Or was it really the eye, and not rather the heart, that identified that shadow in the dusk, among the shoreside lamps?  I know not.  It was Jim, at least; Jim, come for a last look; and we had but time to wave a valedictory gesture and exchange a wordless cry.  This was our second parting, and our capacities were now reversed.  It was mine to play the Argonaut, to speed affairs, to plan and to accomplish—­if need were, at the price of life; it was his to sit at home, to study the calendar, and to wait.  I knew besides another thing that gave me joy.  I knew that my friend had succeeded in my education; that the romance of business, if our fantastic purchase merited the name, had at last stirred my dilletante nature; and, as we swept under cloudy Tamalpais and through the roaring narrows of the bay, the Yankee blood sang in my veins with suspense and exultation.

Outside the heads, as if to meet my desire, we found it blowing fresh from the northeast.  No time had been lost.  The sun was not yet up before the tug cast off the hawser, gave us a salute of three whistles, and turned homeward toward the coast, which now began to gleam along its margin with the earliest rays of day.  There was no other ship in view when the Norah Creina, lying over under all plain sail, began her long and lonely voyage to the wreck.

CHAPTER XII.  THE “NORAH CREINA.”

I love to recall the glad monotony of a Pacific voyage, when the trades are not stinted, and the ship, day after day, goes free.  The mountain scenery of trade-wind clouds, watched (and in my case painted) under every vicissitude of light—­blotting stars, withering in the moon’s glory, barring the scarlet eve, lying across the dawn collapsed into the unfeatured morning bank, or at noon raising their snowy summits between the blue roof of heaven and the blue floor of sea; the small, busy, and deliberate world of the schooner, with its unfamiliar scenes, the spearing of dolphin from the bowsprit end, the holy war on sharks, the cook making bread on the main hatch; reefing down before a violent squall, with the men hanging out on the foot-ropes; the squall itself, the catch at the heart, the opened sluices of the sky; and the relief, the renewed loveliness of life, when all is over, the sun forth again, and our out-fought enemy only a blot upon the leeward sea.  I love to recall, and would that I could reproduce that life, the unforgettable, the unrememberable.  The memory, which shows so wise a backwardness in registering pain, is besides an imperfect recorder of extended pleasures; and a long-continued well-being escapes (as it were, by its mass) our petty methods of commemoration.  On a part of our life’s map there lies a roseate, undecipherable haze, and that is all.