For myself, however, I did but exchange anxieties.  I was no sooner out of one fear than I fell upon another; no sooner secure that I should myself make the intended haven, than I began to be convinced that Trent was there before me.  I climbed into the rigging, stood on the board, and eagerly scanned that ring of coral reef and bursting breaker, and the blue lagoon which they enclosed.  The two islets within began to show plainly—­Middle Brooks and Lower Brooks Island, the Directory named them:  two low, bush-covered, rolling strips of sand, each with glittering beaches, each perhaps a mile or a mile and a half in length, running east and west, and divided by a narrow channel.  Over these, innumerable as maggots, there hovered, chattered, screamed and clanged, millions of twinkling sea-birds:  white and black; the black by far the largest.  With singular scintillations, this vortex of winged life swayed to and fro in the strong sunshine, whirled continually through itself, and would now and again burst asunder and scatter as wide as the lagoon:  so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions.  A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—­the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions.  And a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—­the Flying Scud, the fruit of so many toilers, a recollection in so many lives of men, whose tall spars had been mirrored in the remotest corners of the sea—­lay stationary at last and forever, in the first stage of naval dissolution.  Towards her, the taut Norah Creina, vulture-wise, wriggled to windward:  come from so far to pick her bones.  And, look as I pleased, there was no other presence of man or of man’s handiwork; no Honolulu schooner lay there crowded with armed rivals, no smoke rose from the fire at which I fancied Trent cooking a meal of sea-birds.  It seemed, after all, we were in time, and I drew a mighty breath.

I had not arrived at this reviving certainty before the breakers were already close aboard, the leadsman at his station, and the captain posted in the fore cross-trees to con us through the coral lumps of the lagoon.  All circumstances were in our favour, the light behind, the sun low, the wind still fresh and steady, and the tide about the turn.  A moment later we shot at racing speed betwixt two pier heads of broken water; the lead began to be cast, the captain to bawl down his anxious directions, the schooner to tack and dodge among the scattered dangers of the lagoon; and at one bell in the first dog watch, we had come to our anchor off the north-east end of Middle Brooks Island, in five fathoms water.  The sails were gasketted and covered, the boats emptied of the miscellaneous stores and odds and ends of sea-furniture,