“The weather’s bound to clear up with the shift of wind.”

“Anybody knows that much!” he snapped at me, at the highest pitch of his voice.

“I mean before dark!” I cried.

This was all the opening he ever got from me.  The eagerness with which he seized upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety he had been labouring under.

“Very well,” he shouted, with an affectation of impatience, as if giving way to long entreaties.  “All right.  If we don’t get a shift by then we’ll take that foresail off her and put her head under her wing for the night.”

I was struck by the picturesque character of the phrase as applied to a ship brought-to in order to ride out a gale with wave after wave passing under her breast.  I could see her resting in the tumult of the elements like a sea-bird sleeping in wild weather upon the raging waters with its head tucked under its wing.  In imaginative precision, in true feeling, this is one of the most expressive sentences I have ever heard on human lips.  But as to taking the foresail off that ship before we put her head under her wing, I had my grave doubts.  They were justified.  That long enduring piece of canvas was confiscated by the arbitrary decree of the West Wind, to whom belong the lives of men and the contrivances of their hands within the limits of his kingdom.  With the sound of a faint explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily, leaving behind of its stout substance not so much as one solitary strip big enough to be picked into a handful of lint for, say, a wounded elephant.  Torn out of its bolt-ropes, it faded like a whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered and torn by the shift of wind.  For the shift of wind had come.  The unveiled, low sun glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a confused and tremendous sea dashing itself upon a coast.  We recognised the headland, and looked at each other in the silence of dumb wonder.  Without knowing it in the least, we had run up alongside the Isle of Wight, and that tower, tinged a faint evening red in the salt wind-haze, was the lighthouse on St. Catherine’s Point.

My skipper recovered first from his astonishment.  His bulging eyes sank back gradually into their orbits.  His psychology, taking it all round, was really very creditable for an average sailor.  He had been spared the humiliation of laying his ship to with a fair wind; and at once that man, of an open and truthful nature, spoke up in perfect good faith, rubbing together his brown, hairy hands—­ the hands of a master-craftsman upon the sea: 

“Humph! that’s just about where I reckoned we had got to.”

The transparency and ingenuousness, in a way, of that delusion, the airy tone, the hint of already growing pride, were perfectly delicious.  But, in truth, this was one of the greatest surprises ever sprung by the clearing up mood of the West Wind upon one of the most accomplished of his courtiers.