hristiana_, after the good woman, Christian's wife, in that old book
the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' By her build she was a foreign ship, but I was
not certain of her nationality. She had been painted green, but the
colour was faded and weathered, and the paint peeling off in strips. The
wreck of the mainmast lay alongside, half buried in sand. She was a
forlorn sight, indeed, and I could not look without emotion at the bits
of rope that still hung about her, so often handled of yore by shouting
seamen; or the little scuttle where they had passed up and down to their
affairs; or that poor noseless angel of a figure-head that had dipped
into so many running billows.

I do not know whether it came most from the ship or from the grave, but I
fell into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one
hand against the battered timbers. The homelessness of men and even of
inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in upon
my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an
unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of
something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered Mary, I took
heart again. My uncle would never consent to an imprudent marriage, nor
would she, as I was persuaded, wed without his full approval. It behoved
me, then, to be up and doing for my wife; and I thought with a laugh how
long it was since that great sea-castle, the _Espirito Santo_, had left
her bones in Sandag Bay, and how weak it would be to consider rights so
long extinguished and misfortunes so long forgotten in the process of
time.

I had my theory of where to seek for her remains. The set of the current
and the soundings both pointed to the east side of the bay under the
ledge of rocks. If she had been lost in Sandag Bay, and if, after these
centuries, any portion of her held together, it was there that I should
find it. The water deepens, as I have said, with great rapidity, and
even close along-side the rocks several fathoms may be found. As I
walked upon the edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom of
the bay; the sun shone clear and green and steady in the deeps; the bay
seemed rather like a great transparent crystal, as one sees them in a
lapidary's shop; there was naught to show that it was water but an
internal trembling, a hovering within of sun-glints and netted shadows,
and now and then a faint lap and a dying bubble round the edge. The
s