THE END OF THE VOYAGE

Before daylight on the following morning Gadabout was awake and astir.  She had resolved to catch the early tide and finish her James River cruise that day by a final run to the head of navigation at Richmond.

For the last time the clacking windlass was calling the sleeping anchor from its bed in the river; the Commodore was hanging out the sailing-lights; and Nautica (who could not find the dividers) was stepping off the distance to Richmond on the chart with a hairpin.

How dreary a start before dawn sounds to a landsman!  The hated early call; the hasty breakfast with coffee-cup in one hand and time-table in the other; the dismal drive through dull, sleeping streets; the cheerless station; the gloomy train-shed with its lines of coaches wrapped in acrid engine smoke.

But the houseboater knows another way.  For him, the early call is the call of the tide that finds ready response from a lover of the sea.  Does the tide serve before dawn, man of the ship?  Then before dawn its stir is in your blood; your anchor is heaved home; your sailing-lights, white and green and red, are bravely twinkling; your propellers are tossing the waters astern; and you are off.

You are off with the flood just in from the sea, or with the ebb that is seeking the sea; and with it you go along a way where no one has passed before—­an evanescent way that is made of night shades and river mists.  And after a while you come upon a wonderful thing—­almost the solemn wonder of creation, as, from those thinning, shimmering veils, the world comes slowly forth and takes shape again.

When the real world took shape for Gadabout that morning on the James, she was some distance above Shirley and the river was a smaller river than we had seen at any time before.  By the chart, we observed that it was a comparatively narrow stream all the rest of the way to Richmond.

We had now entered upon a portion of the old waterway that Nautica insisted had been done up in curl-papers.  Here, the voyager must sail around twenty miles of frivolous loops to make five miles of progress.

Upon coming to a group of buildings indicated on the chart and standing close to the right bank, we knew that Gadabout had navigated the first of the fussy curls.  Around it, we had travelled six miles since leaving Shirley, and now had the satisfaction of knowing that the old manor-house itself stood just across from these buildings, less than a mile away.

On a little farther, we passed a fine plantation home called Curle’s Neck.  A long while after that, another large plantation, Meadowville, came alongside.  But the curious thing was that, at the same time, alongside came Curle’s Neck again.  We had travelled something over four miles since leaving it, yet there it stood directly opposite and less than three quarters of a mile from us.

[Illustration:  Varina.]