sight of each other and heading different ways; but when, at last,
the breeze came with the darkling ripple that ran very blue on a
pale sea, they all went in the same direction together. For this
was the homeward-bound fleet from the far-off ends of the earth,
and a Falmouth fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was
heading the flight. One could have imagined her very fair, if not
divinely tall, leaving a scent of lemons and oranges in her wake.

The next day there were very few ships in sight from our mast-
heads--seven at most, perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hull
down, beyond the magic ring of the horizon. The spell of the fair
wind has a subtle power to scatter a white-winged company of ships
looking all the same way, each with its white fillet of tumbling
foam under the bow. It is the calm that brings ships mysteriously
together; it is your wind that is the great separator.

The taller the ship, the further she can be seen; and her white
tallness breathed upon by the wind first proclaims her size. The
tall masts holding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare
for catching the invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from
the water, sail after sail, yard after yard, growing big, till,
under the towering structure of her machinery, you perceive the
insignificant, tiny speck of her hull.

The tall masts are the pillars supporting the balanced planes that,
motionless and silent, catch from the air the ship's motive-power,
as it were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man;
and it is the ship's tall spars, stripped and shorn of their white
glory, that incline themselves before the anger of the clouded
heaven.