“I say, Fosset,” said the captain, who had lingered near awhile, as if in deep thought, as he stood with one foot on the lower step of the companion as if he were trying to recollect something, “I say, we must make some points to-day on the chart, you know!”
“Yes, sir. I don’t think there’ll be any difficulty about that. Do you?”
“No; the sun ought to be pretty clear at noon with a morning like this—clear enough, at all events, for us to find out the latitude and longitude.”
“Just what I said to Spokeshave, sir, before I came down to call you awhile ago.”
“Quite so.”
“Aye, ‘quite so,’ sir.”
Whereupon both sniggered at the skipper’s apt mimicry of Master Conky’s pet phrase, which Captain Applegarth pronounced in the little beggar’s exact tone of voice, so like indeed being the imitation that I nearly choked myself while swallowing the balance of my cocoa, as I hastily drained my cup and rose to follow the skipper up the companion-ladder to the deck.
As Mr Fosset had said, there was a dead calm on the bosom of the deep, for the slight swell that remained after the gale on the previous evening, even up to the time of my going down below, had quite disappeared, the surface of the water being as smooth as glass as far as the horizon line and all aflash now with the rosy hue of sunrise to the eastward. The sky still preserved, however, the pale neutral tints of night in the west, and up to the zenith, where it merged into a faint and beautiful seagreen that lost itself imperceptibly in the warm colouring of the orient, which each moment became more and more intense in hue, heralding the approach of morn.
At last, up jumped the glorious orb of day, proudly, from his ocean bed, came with one bound as it were, a veritable globe of liquid fire, flooding the vast distant heaven and sea with a wealth of light and radiance that seemed to give life to everything around.
“There, Haldane,” said Captain Applegarth, pointing over the taffrail at a lot of straggling masses of quasi-looking stringy stuff that came floating on top of the water close by the ship, resembling vegetable refuse discarded from Neptune’s kitchen garden. “That’s the gulf-weed Mr Fosset was just speaking about to me.”