breeze to a surface of pale,
glowing sapphire, along which the barque, wooing the soft zephyr with
studding-sails spread on both sides, from the royals down, swam with a
sleepy, rhythmical swaying of her taunt spars, at a speed of some five
knots in the hour.

It was close upon eight bells of the afternoon watch, and the saloon
party were all on deck, grouped under the shadow of the awning; the
elders lounging in easy, unconventional attitudes in capacious
basket-chairs, the women, attired in snowy white, beguiling the time by
making a pretence at working at some embroidery, or fancy sewing of some
kind, as they fitfully conversed upon such topics as occurred to them;
while Sir Edgar, clothed in flannels, with a Panama hat tilted well
forward over his eyes, smoked and read with an air of placid enjoyment;
the youngsters, apparently less affected than the rest of us by the
languorous heat of the weather, meanwhile indulging in a game at
hide-and-seek about the decks with the ship's cat.

Of the hands forward, some of the watch were aloft, working at odd jobs
about the rigging, while the drowsy clinking of a spunyarn winch
somewhere on the forecastle, in the shadow of the head sails, accounted
for the remainder. Most of the watch below were invisible; but two or
three industrious ones had grouped themselves on the foredeck, in
situations which secured at once a sufficiency of shadow and a maximum
of breeze, and were smoking and chatting as they washed or repaired
their clothing.

As for me, I was indulging in a brief spell of perfect bodily idleness,
and had established myself in my own particular wicker chair, near the
break of the poop, and, with hands crossed behind my head and cigar in
mouth, was lazily watching a man on the main-royal yard who was reeving
a new set of signal halliards, while my mind was busy upon the
apparently insoluble problem of finding the key to the cipher relating
to Richard Saint Leger's buried treasure.

The signal halliards had just been successfully rove when eight bells
were struck, and the man who had been reeving them--now off duty--was
preparing leisurely to descend to the deck, when, as nine out of every
ten sailors will, he paused to take a last, long, comprehensive look
round the horizon. There was not a sail of any sort in sight from the
deck, not even so much as the glancing of a bird's wing against the
warm, tender, grey tones of the horizon to arrest one's wandering
glanc