? Five
hours, I think?"

"Four or five," said Herrick.

Davis stepped to the door. "What breeze had you that time you made Anaa,
Uncle Ned?" said he.

"Six or seven knots," was the reply.

"Thirty or thirty-five miles," said Davis. "High time we were shortening
sail, then. If it is an island, we don't want to be butting our head
against it in the dark; and if it isn't an island, we can get through it
just as well by daylight. Ready about!" he roared.

And the schooner's head was laid for that elusive glimmer in the sky,
which began already to pale in lustre and diminish in size, as the stain
of breath vanishes from a window pane. At the same time she was reefed
close down.

PART II

THE QUARTETTE

CHAPTER VII

THE PEARL-FISHER

About four in the morning, as the captain and Herrick sat together on
the rail, there arose from the midst of the night in front of them the
voice of breakers. Each sprang to his feet and stared and listened. The
sound was continuous, like the passing of a train; no rise or fall could
be distinguished; minute by minute the ocean heaved with an equal
potency against the invisible isle; and as time passed, and Herrick
waited in vain for any vicissitude in the volume of that roaring, a
sense of the eternal weighed upon his mind. To the expert eye the isle
itself was to be inferred from a certain string of blots along the
starry heaven. And the schooner was laid to and anxiously observed till
daylight.

There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in the east;
then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between crimson and
silver; and then coals of fire. These glimmered a while on the sea-line,
and seemed to brighten and darken and spread out, and still the night
and the stars reigned undisturbed; it was as though a spark should catch
and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost incombustible
wall-hanging, and the room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after,
and the whole east glowed with gold and scarlet, and the hollow of
heaven was filled with the daylight.

The isle--the undiscovered, the scarce-believed in--now lay before them
and close aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he
beheld anything more strange and delicate. The beach was excellently
white, the continuous barrier of trees inimitably green; the land
perhaps ten feet high, the trees thirty more. Every here and there, as
the schooner coasted northwar