not yet revealed for what it was, nor showing the movement and life and grace of waves.  For no light shone upon it, and it was not yet near enough to be distinguished.  It grew rapidly, but the haze and silence had put me into so dreamy a state that I had forgotten the ordinary anxiety and irritation of a calm, nor had I at the moment that eager expectancy of movement which should accompany the sight of that dark line upon the sea.

Other things possessed me, the memory of home and of the Downs.  There went before this breeze, as it were, attendant servants, outriders who brought with them the scent of those first flowers in the North Wood or beyond Gumber Corner, and the fragrance of our grass, the savour which the sheep know at least, however much the visitors to my dear home ignore it.  A deeper sympathy even than that of the senses came with those messengers and brought me the beeches and the yew trees also, although I was so far out at sea, for the loneliness of this great water recalled the loneliness of the woods, and both those solitudes—­the real and the imaginary—­mixed in my mind together as they might in the mind of a sleeping man.

Before this wind as it approached, the sky also cleared:  not of clouds, for there were none, but of that impalpable and warm mist which seems to us, who know the south country and the Channel, to be so often part of the sky, and to shroud without obscuring the empty distances of our seas.  There was a hard clear light to the north; and even over the Downs, low as they were upon the horizon, there was a sharp belt of blue.  I saw the sun strike the white walls of Lady Newburgh’s Folly, and I saw, what had hitherto been all confused, the long line of the Arundel Woods contrasting with the plain.  Then the boom went over to port, the jib filled, I felt the helm pulling steadily for the first time in so many hours, and the boat responded.  The wind was on me; and though it was from the north, that wind was warm, for it came from the sheltered hills.

Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few moments, which had so little to do with the art of sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of the full life that goes with the governing of sails and rudders.  For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind—­and the boat made three.  There was work to be done in pressing against the tiller and in bringing her up to meet the seas, small though they were, for my boat was also small.  Life came into everything; the Channel leapt and (because the wind was across the tide) the little waves broke in small white tips:  in their movement and my own, in the dance of the boat and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in