So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the
sloop's bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the
forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on,
careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Forty
stanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each of
which ended infallibly with
'Says the commodo--ore;
and the third with
'Says the female smuggler;'
and then gave up in despair; and watched in a dreamy, tired, half-sad
mood, the everlasting sparkle of the water as our bows threw it
gently off in sheets of flame and 'tender curving lines of creamy'
fire, that ran along the glassy surface, and seemed to awaken the sea
for yards round into glittering life, as countless diamonds, and
emeralds, and topazes, leaped and ran and dived round us, while we
slipped slowly by; and then a speck of light would show far off in
the blank darkness, and another, and another, and slide slowly up to
us--shoals of medusae, every one of them a heaving globe of flame;
and some unseen guillemot would give a startled squeak, or a
shearwater close above our heads suddenly stopped the yarn, and
raised a titter among the men, by his ridiculously articulate, and
not over-complimentary, cry; and then a fox's bark from the cliffs
came wild and shrill, although so faint and distant; or the lazy gaff
gave a sad uneasy creak; and then a soft warm air, laden with heather
honey, and fragrant odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came sighing
from the land; while all around us was the dense blank of the night,
except where now and then some lonely gleam through the southern
clouds showed the cliff-tops on our right.
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