On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic.  The wind was steady and generous.  The warm sunlight danced.  I should not have been surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the greatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek, smiling with approval of the scene below—­melancholy approval, for we would remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale and sickly when Paul, that argumentative zealot, came to provide a world, already thinking more of industry and State politics than of the gods, with a hard-wearing theology which would last till Manchester came.  For the Windhover had drifted into a time and place as innocent of man’s highest achievements as is joy of death.  The wind and sea were chanting.  The riding of the ship kept time to that measure.  The vault was turquoise, and the moving floor was cobalt.  The white islands of the Olympians were in the sky.

Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, with nothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over from earth’s earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in the north.  That cloud did not rise.  It blew towards us straight over the seas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail, heading east of south of us.  She was, when at a distance, a baffling mass of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed.  She got abeam of us.  Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper to give grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the ship of romance, and in such a time and place.  She was a cloud that, when it mounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into the meridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mist blown forward on the wind.  She might have risen at any moment.  Her green hull had the sheer of a sea hollow.  Her bows pressed continually onward, like the crest of a wave curving forward to break, but held, as though enchanted.  Sometimes, when her white mass heeled from us under the pressure of the wind, a red light flashed from her submerged body.  She passed silently, a shining phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms do.

7

When the boots, exploded on the saloon floor by the petulant mate, woke me, it was three of a morning which, for my part, was not in the almanac.  “We’re bewitched,” the mate said, climbing over me into his cupboard.  “I never thought I should want to see our fleet so much.”

“Aye,” remarked the chief engineer, who came shuffling in then for some sleep, “ye’ll find that fleet quick, or the stokers are giving orders.  D’ye think a ship is driven by the man at the wheel?  No’ that I want to smell Hull.”