hcott retired to their cabins in anticipation of Captain Pigot's
appearance on deck to watch the nightly operation of reefing topsails,
leaving Mr Reid and Mr Maxwell to slowly pace the quarter-deck side by
side. It being now my watch on deck, I stationed myself in the waist on
the larboard side of the deck and endeavoured to forget the gloomy
forebodings which had arisen out of the conversation I had recently
overheard by abandoning myself to the soothing influences of the
glorious eventide.

It was indeed a glorious evening, such as is seldom or never to be met
with outside the tropics. The wind had gradually fallen away during the
afternoon until it had dropped stark calm; and there the ship lay, with
her head to the northward, gently rolling on the long glassy swell which
came creeping stealthily up out from the northward and eastward. The
small islands of Mona and Monita--the latter a mere rock--lay broad on
our larboard quarter about eight miles distant, two delicate purplish
pink blots on the south-western horizon, whilst Desecho reared its head
above the north-eastern horizon on our starboard bow, a soft grey
marking in the still softer grey haze of the sky in that quarter. A
great pile of delicately-tinted purple and ruby clouds with golden edges
lay heaped up in detached fantastic masses along the glowing western
horizon, shaped into the semblance of an aerial archipelago, with far-
stretching promontories and peninsulas, and boldly jutting capes and
headlands with deep gulfs and winding straits of rosy sky between. Some
of these celestial islands were shaped along their edges into a series
of minute gold-tipped projections and irregularities, which needed only
the slightest effort of the fancy to become converted into the spires
and pinnacles of a populous city or busy seaport; whilst certain minute
detached flakelets of crimson and golden cloud dotted here and there
about the aerial channels might easily be imagined to be fairy argosies
navigating the celestial sea. Gazing, as I did, enraptured, upon that
scene of magical beauty, it was not difficult to guess at the origin of
that most poetical--as it is perhaps the oldest--nautical superstition,
which gives credence to the idea that there exists, far away beyond the
sunset, an enchanted region which poor storm-beaten sailors are
sometimes permitted to reach, and wherein, during an existence which is
indefinitely prolonged, they enjoy a complete immunit