take her in hand and mould her in little things, and anon to take
her in my arms just as she was. The latter feeling was resolutely
crushed. To be plain, I had endured what is euphemistically called
"disappointment" already; and, not being a complete coxcomb, I had
no intention of courting a second.

Yet, when I write of Eva Denison, I am like to let my pen outrun my
tale. I lay the pen down, and a hundred of her sayings ring in my
ears, with my own contradictious comments, that I was doomed so soon
to repent; a hundred visions of her start to my eyes; and there is
the trade-wind singing in the rigging, and loosening a tress of my
darling's hair, till it flies like a tiny golden streamer in the
tropic sun. There, it is out! I have called her what she was to
be in my heart ever after. Yet at the time I must argue with her
- with her! When all my courage should have gone to love-making,
I was plucking it up to sail as near as I might to plain
remonstrance! I little dreamt how the ghost of every petty word
was presently to return and torture me.

So it is that I can see her and hear her now on a hundred separate
occasions beneath the awning beneath the stars on deck below at noon
or night but plainest of all in the evening of the day we signalled
the Island of Ascension, at the close of that last concert on the
quarter-deck. The watch are taking down the extra awning; they are
removing the bunting and the foot-lights. The lanterns are trailed
forward before they are put out; from the break of the poop we watch
the vivid shifting patch of deck that each lights up on its way. The
stars are very sharp in the vast violet dome above our masts; they
shimmer on the sea; and our trucks describe minute orbits among the
stars, for the trades have yet to fail us, and every inch of canvas