A new time was beginning in such a world.  There was a massive purple battlement on the sea, at a great distance, the last entrenchment of night; but a multitude of rays had stormed it, poured through clefts and chasms in the wall, and escaped to the Windhover on a broad road that was newly laid from the sky to this planet.  The sun was at one end of the road, and we were at the other.  There were only the two of us on that road.  On our port beam the shadow which was East Anglia became suddenly that bright shore which is sometimes conjectured, but is never reached.

The Windhover drove athwart the morning, and her bows would ride over the horizon to divide it, and then the skyline joined again as she sank below it.  We were beginning to live.  I did not know what the skipper would think of it, so I did not cheer.  Sometimes the sea did this for me, making a loud applause as it leaped over the prow.  The trawler was a good ship; you could feel that.  She was as easy and buoyant as a thoroughbred.  She would take a wave in a stride.  I liked her start of surprise when she met a wave of unexpected speed and strength, and then leaped at it, and threw it, white and shouting, all around us.  It was that part of a first voyage when you feel you were meant to be a navigator.  To stand at the end of the bridge, rolling out over the cataracts roaring below, and to swing back, and out again, watching the ship’s head decline into a hollow of the seas, and then to clutch the saddle as she reared with a sudden twist and swing above the horizon, and in such a vast and illuminated theatre, was to awake to a new virtue in life.  We were alone there.  There were only comets of smoke on the bright wall of the sky, of steamers out of sight.

At sunset we made Smith’s Knoll Light, and dropped the land.  The cluster of stars astern, which was a fleet of Yarmouth herring boats at work, went out in the dark.  I had, for warmth and company in the wheel-house on the bridge, while listening to the seas getting up, only signals from Orion and the Great Bear, the glow of the pipe of the silent fellow at the wheel, and the warm shaft of light which streamed from somewhere in the ship’s body and isolated the foremast as a column of gold.  There was the monody, confident but subdued, the most ancient song in the world, of invisible waters.  Sometimes there was a shock when she dropped into a hollow, and a vicious shower whipped across the glass of the wheel-house.  I then got the sad feeling, much too soon, that the inhospitable North was greeting us.  It is after sundown at sea, when looking through the dark to the stars, listening to sounds that are as though ancient waters were still wandering under a sky in which day has not been kindled, seeking coasts not yet formed, it is in such nights that one’s thoughts are of destiny, and then the remembrance of our late eager activities brings a little smile.  There being no illumination in the wheel-house but