Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
The poet is also the prophet; and maybe, thought I, when old Ben Jonson planned this fairy temple of words, he had his eye on some such another little delicate goddess as that yonder.
But there was to happen presently something of a kind to send sentiment flying.
Bit by bit the cloud-mailed sky had drawn away down into the northward, until far past our mastheads that way it was clear blue heaven with an horizon ruling it of a sort of transparent sharpness that made you imagine you saw the atmosphere beyond through it as though it were the edge of some huge lens. The breeze was weak and the yacht’s pace very leisurely; there were hints of a calm at hand, here and there in certain long glassy swathes which wound like currents amongst the darker shadow of the wrinkling breeze upon the water; to every small roll upon the long sleepy undulation, the main boom swang in with a short rattle of canvas in the head of the sail and a flap or two forwards with the smite of the mast by the square topsail as though there were hands aloft lazily beating a carpet.
The vessel ahead was steering dead for us, her masts in one. She was much smaller than I had supposed from the first glimpse I caught of her from the masthead—a little brig, apparently, her cloths showing out rusty to the brilliance as she neared us, albeit afar they had shone like a star of white fire. Her hull was of a dirty yellow—a sort of pea soup colour, and the foot of her foresail was spread by a bentinck boom. She was without an atom of interest in my eyes—a small foreigner, as I supposed, sluggishly lumbering home to some Spanish or Italian port with her forecastle filled with chocolate-coloured Dagos, and the cabin atmosphere poisonous with the lingering fumes of bad cooking.
Wilfrid and Finn stood looking at her together, the latter raising a glass to his eye from time to time. I knocked the ashes out of my bowl and crossed over to them.
‘It will be strange if she has any news to give us of the “Shark,”’ said I.
‘We will speak her, of course,’ said Wilfrid.
‘Looks as if she meant to give us the stem,’ exclaimed Finn, with a glance aft at the fellow at the helm; ‘she is steering dead on for us as if her course were a bee-line and we were athwart it.’