(but no liner, that was plain enough,
no liner), and two men beside me, who were going out with me in her,
watching her. She was little more than a shadow with a port light. She
gave a deep, shuddering warning. She was off. We had been for a last
run round the town. We were to board her in the outer lock. The wind
was whining in the telegraph-wires. It was hazing the pools of rain,
which were bright and bleak with the last of a brazen yellow sunset.
"Happy days!" said one of us. "Who wouldn't sell that little farm?...
Now we're in for it. It will be the devil of an old, tough night."
(Where this night is that friend? Mine-sweeping? Patrolling? Or is
he---- But I hope not. He was a good fellow and a sailor.)

We were better off than we knew then, though then we thought it would
be hard luck for a dog. Our thoughts turned to the snug indoor places
of the lighted town behind us; for in the small hours we should be
plunging off Hartland; with the Wolf to come, and the Bay after that;
and the glass falling. But youth did know it was young, and that this
night, wild and forbidding, and the old _Sirius_ rolling away into it,
would look fine when seen through tobacco smoke in the years to come.

For the light we saw at sea never fades. It survives our voyaging. It
shines into the mind and abides there. We watched the horizon
steadfastly for lands we did not know. The sun came up each day to a
world that was not the same, no matter how it looked. At night we
changed our stars. We heard nothing but the wind and the waves, and the
quiet voice of a shipmate yarning with his pipe in his mouth. The
elements could interrupt us, but not the world. Not a gull of that was
left.

And somehow the beginning of a voyage seemed to be always in westerly
weather, at the beginning of winter. The English land to me is a
twilight coast with clouds like iron above it poised in a windy light
of aquamarine, and a sunset of lucid saffron. Against that western
light, bright, bare, and penetrating as the ruthless judgment of
impersonal divinity, the polished waves mount, outlined as hard as jet,
and move towards us. The ship's prow rises to cut out segments of the
west; falls into the dark hollows of waves. The wind pours over us, an
icy and ponderable flood, and is increasing. Where England has sunk in
the dark one clear eye, like a yellow planet, comes out to watch us.

One thinks of the sea now as something gone, like the old world. There
once a