swung, casting our wash in waves along the quay-walls, and so, after a
pause during which we held our breath and drifted from the line of
watching faces, had headed away for the great empty sky-line beyond
which the islands lay. I knew that they lay yonder; for, the evening
before, my father had led me up a tall hill and pointed them out to me--
black specks in the red ball of the sun. But to-day, as hour after hour
went by with the pant of the engines, the lift and slide of the Atlantic
swell, the tonic wind humming against the stays, my eyes grew heavy, and
at length my head dropped against my father's shoulder. And then--to me
it seemed the next instant--he woke me up and pointed towards the
islands as they rose out of the indigo sea. At first they looked rather
like low-lying clouds, but after a minute or two there was no mistaking
them; for, as if they had just discovered _us_, they hung out lamp after
lamp, some steady, some intermittent, but all of them gleaming yellow
along the floor of the sea save one, a crimson light which hid and
showed itself again northward of the rest. Crimson was my favourite
colour in those days, and even as I dropped back into sleep I decided
that I liked this lamp the best of all.

I awoke again to the sound of voices. We were passing a pilot-boat out
there on the watch for ships. Her crew hailed us as we went by, and I
saw their faces in the green radiance of our starboard light--gaunt,
dark faces, altogether foreign. One of the men, the oldest, was
bareheaded, with long grey locks, and wore a yellow neckcloth with his
shirt open below it, and his naked chest showing. Their voices as they
answered our skipper were clear and gay like the voices of children.

And, next, we were alongside a quay. Our seats, our bulwarks, even our
decks, shone with dew. A crowd stood on the dim quay-edge and looked
down on us, and chattered, but in soft voices. There was a policeman