“Move!  Move!  Move!” cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with a chair as though he were an errant hen.  “Out of the way, Ridley, and in half an hour you’ll find it ready.”

She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and swearing as he went along the passage.

“I daresay he isn’t very strong,” said Mrs. Chailey, looking at Mrs. Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.

“It’s books,” sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the floor to the shelf.  “Greek from morning to night.  If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn’t know his ABC.”

The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make the first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper, being somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough.  October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious.  Great tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole of England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple.  Under that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered.  In thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming, until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down the paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid them upon cold stone ledges in the village church.  Innumerable parties of picnickers coming home at sunset cried, “Was there ever such a day as this?” “It’s you,” the young men whispered; “Oh, it’s you,” the young women replied.  All old people and many sick people were drawn, were it only for a foot or two, into the open air, and prognosticated pleasant things about the course of the world.  As for the confidences and expressions of love that were heard not only in cornfields but in lamplit rooms, where the windows opened on the garden, and men with cigars kissed women with grey hairs, they were not to be counted.  Some said that the sky was an emblem of the life to come.  Long-tailed birds clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood to wood, with golden eyes in their plumage.

But while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the sea.  They took it for granted that the sea was calm; and there was no need, as there is in many houses when the creeper taps on the bedroom windows, for the couples to murmur before they kiss, “Think of the ships to-night,” or “Thank Heaven, I’m not the man in the lighthouse!” For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line dissolved, like snow in water.  The grown-up view, indeed, was not much clearer than the view of the little creatures in bathing drawers who were trotting in to the foam all along the coasts of England, and scooping up buckets full of water.  They saw white sails or tufts of smoke pass across the horizon, and if you had said that these were waterspouts, or the petals of white sea flowers, they would have agreed.