Grey and silver sea-gulls hovered over the little cutter, all sweeping down curiously every now and then to see what the boys were doing there in that mastless and oar-less boat out on the wide waters; and, presently, a shoal of mackerel rose round about them, so thickly that Dick thought he could scoop up some in the buckets, only the fish were too wary and dived down below the surface the moment he stretched his arm out over the side beyond his reach.
A couple of porpoises, too, swam by, playing leap-frog again; and, after these, a much larger monster, which might possibly have been a grampus, though Bob could tell nothing about it, not knowing what it was. The movements of all these, with the constantly-changing appearance of the sea, now blue, now green, now brown, as some cloud shadow passed over it, made up a varied panorama such as neither of the two lads ever saw or thought of before!
Ships, also, hove in sight and disappeared on the horizon, their white sails gleaming out in the far-off distance; one moment high in the air as if bound skywards, the next sinking into the curving depths of the sea.
Now and again, too, the smoke-wreath of some passing steamer, coasting along more speedily than the sailing craft, would sacrilegiously blot the blue of the heavens!
But, all the while, though the distant ships might sail along to their haven, and the steamers shape shorter courses to their port independent of wind and tide alike, the poor dismasted, dismantled little yacht was the sport of all alike; first setting down Channel with the ebb, as if going out on a cruise into the wide Atlantic, and then again up Channel with the flood towards Dover.
The boat was ever drifting and tossed about ever, like a battered shuttlecock, by the battledore currents, some four of which contend for the mastery throughout the livelong day in that wonderful waterway, the English Channel; two always setting east, relieving each other in turn, and two west, with a cross-tide coming atop of them, twice in every twenty-four hours, trying fruitlessly to soothe the differences of the quarrelsome quartette!