sit probably caused us to dally
less than usual over our morning meal. At all events, when we rose from
the table and went on deck the boat was still nearly a mile distant.
And a very curious object she looked; for the weather being stark calm,
and the water glassy smooth, the line of the horizon was invisible, and
the boat had all the appearance of hanging suspended in mid-air. This
effect was doubtless heightened by the extremely rarefied condition of
the atmosphere, which also gave rise to another effect, familiar enough
to me, who had witnessed it often before, but productive of the utmost
astonishment to my passengers, who now, it seemed, beheld it for the
first time. This effect was the extraordinary apparent distortion of
shape and dimensions which the boat underwent. She appeared to stand as
high out of the water as a five-hundred-ton ship, while her breadth
remained somewhat about what it ought to be, thus assuming very much the
appearance of a plank standing on its edge. The men at the oars were
similarly distorted, and when, upon going on deck, our eyes first rested
upon them, the only indication of their being in active movement
consisted in their rapid alternate evanishment and reappearance as they
swung forward and backward at the oars. The oars betrayed their
presence merely by the flash of the sun upon their wet blades; but a
fraction of a second after each flash there appeared on each side of the
boat a large square patch of deep ultramarine, which could have been
nothing but the broken surface of the water where cut by the oar-blades,
for the ripple caused by the boat's progress through the water similarly
appeared as a heavy line of blue extending on each side of the boat for
a certain distance, when it broke up into a series of ever more widely
detached and diminishing blots of blue. The curious atmospheric
illusion, of course, grew less marked as the boat approached; and when
she had neared us to within about a quarter of a mile, it vanished
altogether, the craft resuming her normal everyday aspect.

At length she ranged up alongside of us. One of our lads dropped a line
into her, and the man who had been handling the yoke-lines--a grizzled,
tanned, and weather-beaten individual, somewhere on the shady side of
fifty--came up over the side, the rest of the crew remaining in their
boat alongside, from which they engaged with our own men in the usual
sailors' chat. The stranger--who, despite th