Here I soon fell asleep, utterly wearied out, not only from standing about so long, having been on my legs ever since the early morning when I lit the galley fire, but also quite overcome with all the excitement I had gone through.
I awoke with a start.
The sun was shining brightly through the open scuttle of the fo’c’s’le and it was broad daylight.
It was not this that had roused me, though; for, habituated as I now was to the ways of sailor-folk, it made little difference to me whether I slept by day or night so long as I had a favourable opportunity for a comfortable caulk. Indeed, my eyes might have been ‘scorched out,’ as the saying is, without awaking me.
It was something else that aroused me,—an unaccustomed sound which I had not heard since I left home and ran away to sea.
It was the cooing of doves in the distance.
“Roo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo! Coo-coo! Roo-c–o–o!”
I heard it as plainly as possible, just as the plaintive sound used to catch my ear from the wood at the back of the vicarage garden in the old times, when I loved to listen to the bird’s love call—those old times that seemed so far off in the perspective of the past, and yet were only two years at most agone!
Why, I must be dreaming, I thought.
But, no; there came the soft, sweet cooing of the doves again.