“Why, lad, by the look of you we should be running ashore!” exclaimed my father.

“And so we should be at this moment,” said I, “were not the reckoning out.”

Captain Pomery reached out for the paper.  “The reckoning is right enough,” said he, after studying it awhile.

“Then on what land, in Heaven’s name, are we running?” my father demanded testily.

“Why, on Corsica,” I answered, pointing with my compass’s foot as he bent over the chart.  “On Corsica.  Where else?”

It wanted between three and four hours of sunset when we made the landfall and assured ourselves that what appeared so like a low cloud on the east-north-eastern horizon was indeed the wished-for island.  We fell to discussing our best way to approach it; my father at first maintaining that the coast would be watched by Genoese vessels, and therefore we should do wisely to take down sail and wait for darkness.

Against this, Captain Pomery maintained—­

1.  That we were carrying a fair wind, and the Lord knew how long that would hold.

2.  That the moon would rise in less than three hours after dark, and thenceforth we should run almost the same risk of detection as by daylight.

3.  That in any case we could pass for what we really were, an English trader in ballast, barely escaped from shipwreck, dismasted, with broken steerage, making for the nearest port.

“Man,” said Captain Pomery, looking about him, “we must be a poor set of liars if we can’t pitch a yarn on this evidence!”

My father allowed himself to be persuaded, the more easily as the argument jumped with his impatience.  Accordingly, we stood on for land, making no concealment; and the wind holding steady on our beam, and the sun dropping astern of us in a sky without a cloud, ’twas incredible how soon we began to make out the features of the land.  It rose like a shield to a central boss, which trembled, as it were, into view and revealed itself a mountain peak, snowcapped and shining, before ever the purple mist began to slip from the slopes below it and disclose their true verdure.  No sail broke the expanse of sea between us and the shore; and, as we neared it, no scarp of cliff, no house or group of houses broke the island’s green monotony.  From the water’s edge to the high snow-line it might have been built of moss, so vivid its colour was, yet soft as velvet, and softer and still more vivid as we approached.

Within two miles of shore, and not long before dark, the wind (as Captain Pomery had promised) broke off and headed us, blowing cool and fresh off the land.  I was hauling in the foresheet and belaying when a sudden waft of fragrance fetched me upright, with head thrown back and nostrils inhaling the breeze.

“Ay,” said my father, at my elbow, “there is no scent on earth to compare with it.  You smell the macchia, lad.  Drink well your first draught of it, delicious as first love.”