not
there, that we were watching something past its doom. It drew abeam,
and we saw what it was, a derelict sailing ship, mastless and awash.
The alien wilderness was around us now, and we saw a sky that was
overcast and driven, and seas that were uplifted, which had grown
incredibly huge, swift, and perilous, and they had colder and more
sombre hues.

The derelict was a schooner, a lifeless and soddened hulk, so heavy and
uncontesting that its foundering seemed at hand. The waters poured back
and forth at her waist, as though holding her body captive for the
assaults of the active seas which came over her broken bulwarks, and
plunged ruthlessly about. There was something ironic in the
indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It
mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a
dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now
do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew
open under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the
dead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a
great comber ran at her, as if it had but just spied her, and thought
she was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we
heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, on a summit in
desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, the
accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.

I turned, and there beside me was the lady who had wanted to find the
sea. She was gazing at the place where the wreck was last seen, her
eyes fixed, her mouth a little open in awe and horror.

_April 1910._

XI. The Voyage of the _Mona_

There was the _Mona_, Yeo's boat, below the quay wall; but I could not
see her owner. The unequal stones of that wall have the weathered
appearance of a natural outcrop of rock, for they were matured by the
traffic of ships when America was a new yarn among sailors. They are
the very stones one would choose to hear speak. Yet the light of early
morning in that spacious estuary was so young and tenuous that you
could suppose this heavy planet had not yet known the stains of night
and evil; and the _Mona_, it must be remembered, is white without and
egg-blue within. Such were the reflections she made, lively at anchor
on the swirls of a flood-tide bright enough for the sea-bottom to have
been luminous, that I felt I must find Yeo. The white houses of the
village,