And yet the next time she glanced up at the pilot house, and saw the captain standing beside the wheelsman, she had to smile. He wore a blue coat, with brass buttons, tight to his neck, and a high white collar, and white duck trousers, with a stripe up the sides. And his face was round, and smooth shaven, and very sunburned, with round eyes, so blue that they seemed like glass marbles. But before that first day was over, Polly and he were firm friends and shipmates.
The Admiral did not rise until six o’clock. As he had remarked the night before, he had watched the sun rise from nearly every body of salt water on the globe, and now he was convinced that it could get up without his help, and he needed his beauty sleep badly.
To the girls, it was a wonderful sight, that first sunrise. The clouds turned to flakes of radiant gold and rose and violet, shot through and through with silver lights. When the sun rose over the horizon line, every wavelet caught its glory in miniature, and the whole wide sea looked like “gloryland,” as Aunty Welcome said. Isabel leaned over the rail at the stern, looking out at the widening wake of pearly foam, that glittered and sparkled like countless diamonds in the sunshine.
“I wonder whether that isn’t what makes the pink tint inside sea shells,” she said musingly to Kate. “Maybe they caught some of the color and imprisoned it.”
Polly came hurrying along deck, her cheeks aglow, her cap on the back of her head, and hands deep in her reefer pockets, for the early mornings were cool.
“Girls, there’s a school of porpoises moving off shore,” she called, excitedly. “You can see them around the prow plainly.”
They hurried after her, and reached the extreme point of the prow, beyond the neat coils of rope and the capstan.
Polly laughed over the latter.
“I used to call that the captain,” she said. “There was a song grandfather sang to me, something about ‘We’ll heave the capstan round, my boys,’ and I always said, ‘We’ll heave the captain round, my boys.’ I remember he told me such things never happened on well-regulated ships.”
“Well, forevermore, girls,” exclaimed Sue, as she leaned over the prow, until she could have reached down and touched the gilded crest of the Hippocampus itself. “There are a lot down there, and they’re going as fast as we are!”