d goes with a rush, a few minutes only intervening
between broad day and deepest night. The first faint streak of scarcely
perceptible pallor along the verge of the eastern horizon on our
starboard bow lengthened and widened, and grew more pronounced, even as
I gazed upon it, until it became a broad segment of cold, colourless
light, insensibly melting out of the circumscribing darkness. Then a
faint, delicate tone of softest primrose began to steal through it,
quickly strengthening and brightening as the light spread upward and
right and left, paling the stars one by one, until they dwindled away
and vanished in the soft, rich blue that was swiftly chasing the
darkness across the sky. Anon, a warm, rich, rosy flush began to
pervade the primrose tones of the eastern horizon, against which the
level line of the ocean's marge cut sharply in tones of deepest indigo;
while, overhead, the brightening blue was delicately mottled with a
whole archipelago of thin, fleecy cloudlets, pink tinged, and bordered
along their lower edges with purest gold, that were mysteriously
floating into view, apparently from illimitable space. Then from that
point on the horizon where the deepening rose colour glowed most
brilliantly, up shot a single white ray perpendicularly toward the
zenith, narrow and well defined where it sprang from the horizon, and
broadening as it soared aloft until it became lost among the lowest tier
of clouds, now deeply tinged with dyes of richest crimson. This single
ray had scarcely made itself apparent ere it was followed by others
radiating fan-wise from the same spot; and in another instant a spark of
golden flame flashed across the sea from the horizon, at the point of
junction of the rays, tingeing the small wave-crests in its wake with
ruddy gold that deepened first into a line and then into a broad path of
shimmering golden radiance, as the burning rim of the sun soared slowly
out of the purple sea.

At the same instant, the man who had the lookout, and who had stationed
himself on the topgallant forecastle, right in the eyes of the ship,
turned sharply round, facing the poop, and reported--

"Land ho! right ahead."

I had been so completely absorbed in contemplation of the magnificent
spectacle of the sunrise that, for the moment, I had entirely forgotten
the island, and everything connected with it; but the cry of the lookout
brought it back to my mind with a flash, and, moving to the
mizzen-riggin