all day brooded above the
bar. Everywhere around them the gray cloud hung and curled and curdled;
it was impossible to see an oar's-length on either side; their very
faces were unfamiliar, and seemed to be looking like the faces of
spirits from a different atmosphere; their little boat was the whole
world, and beyond it was only void. Now and then an idle puff parted the
bank to right and left, their sail flapped impatiently, and in the
sudden space they saw the barge that dashed along with the great white
seine-boat heaped high with nets towering in its midst, the oars of the
six red-shirted rowers flashing in the sun as it cut the channel and
rushed by to join the fishing-fleet outside,--or they caught a glimpse
of some little gunning-float, covered with wisps of hay and carrying its
single occupant couched _perdu_ along its length,--or, while they
lunched and trifled and jested, Eve with her crumbs tolled about them
the dwellers in the depths, and in the falling flake of sunshine laughed
to see a stately aldermanic flounder, that came paddling after a
chicken-bone, put to rout by a satanic sculpin, whereat an eel swiftly
snaked the prize away, and the frost-fish, collecting at a chance of
civil war, mingled in the _melee_, tooth and nail, or rather fin and
tail. Then the vapors would darken round them again, till, with the
stray rays caught and refracted in their fleece, it seemed like living
in an opal full of cloudy color and fire. Far off they heard the great
ground-swell of the surf upon the beach, or there came the dull report
of the sportsmen in the marsh, or they exchanged first a laugh and then
a yawn with some other unseen party becalmed in the fog and drifting
with the currents; and all day long, on this side and on that, the cloud
rang with near and distant music, as if Ariel and his sprites had lost
their way in it, the tinkling of a mandolin, the singing of a clear,
rich voice that had the tenor's golden strain, and yet, in floating
through the mist, was sweet and sighing as a flute. The melody and the
undistinguished words it bore upon its wings, delicious tune and
passionate meaning, seemed the speech of another planet, an orb of song,
the delicate sound lost when at sunset the threaded mist broke up and
streamed away in fire, but coming again, as if they were haunted by the
viewless voices of the air, when star-beam and haze tangled together at
last in the dusk of summer night and found them still rock