What little wind there was that day blew from the southeast, and sheathed the brightness of the noonday sky in a soft veil of haze; and having made this pretty sight their own, Eve’s party spread their sail for tacking to and fro, meaning to reach the sea.  This, for some hidden reason, the wind refused to let them do, and when it found them obstinate brought an accomplice upon the scene, and they suddenly surprised themselves rocking this side the bar, and caught in the vapory fringes of a dark sea-turn, that, creeping round about, had soon so wrapped and folded them that they could scarcely see the pennon drooping at their mast-head.  This done, the wind fell altogether, and they lay there a part of the great bank of mist that all day brooded above the bar.  Everywhere around them the gray cloud hung and curled and curdled; it was impossible to see an oar’s-length on either side; their very faces were unfamiliar, and seemed to be looking like the faces of spirits from a different atmosphere; their little boat was the whole world, and beyond it was only void.  Now and then an idle puff parted the bank to right and left, their sail flapped impatiently, and in the sudden space they saw the barge that dashed along with the great white seine-boat heaped high with nets towering in its midst, the oars of the six red-shirted rowers flashing in the sun as it cut the channel and rushed by to join the fishing-fleet outside,—­or they caught a glimpse of some little gunning-float, covered with wisps of hay and carrying its single occupant couched perdu along its length,—­or, while they lunched and trifled and jested, Eve with her crumbs tolled about them the dwellers in the depths, and in the falling flake of sunshine laughed to see a stately aldermanic flounder, that came paddling after a chicken-bone, put to rout by a satanic sculpin, whereat an eel swiftly snaked the prize away, and the frost-fish, collecting at a chance of civil war, mingled in the melee, tooth and nail, or rather fin and tail.  Then the vapors would darken round them again, till, with the stray rays caught and refracted in their fleece, it seemed like living in an opal full of cloudy color and fire.  Far off they heard the great ground-swell of the surf upon the beach, or there came the dull report of the sportsmen in the marsh, or they exchanged first a laugh and then a yawn with some other unseen party becalmed in the fog and drifting with the currents; and all day long, on this side and on that, the cloud rang with near and distant music, as if Ariel and his sprites had lost their way in it, the tinkling of a mandolin, the singing of a clear, rich voice that had the tenor’s golden strain, and yet, in floating through the mist, was sweet and sighing as a flute.  The melody and the undistinguished words it bore upon its wings, delicious tune and passionate meaning, seemed the speech of another planet, an orb of song, the delicate sound lost when at sunset the threaded mist broke up and streamed away in fire, but coming again, as if they were haunted by the viewless voices of the air, when star-beam and haze tangled together at last in the dusk of summer night and found them still rocking on the swell, vainly whistling for the wind, and slowly tiding up with the flood.