A blast in my ear, like the voice of fifty trombones, galvanized me
into full consciousness. The musician, smiling and tousled, was at my
bedside, raising a foghorn to his lips with deadly intention. 'It's a
way we have in the Dulcibella,' he said, as I started up on one
elbow. 'I didn't startle you much, did I?' he added.

'Well, I like the _mattinata_ better than the cold douche,' I
answered, thinking of yesterday.

'Fine day and magnificent breeze!' he answered. My sensations this
morning were vastly livelier than those of yesterday at the same
hour. My limbs were supple again and my head clear. Not even the
searching wind could mar the ecstasy of that plunge down to smooth,
seductive sand, where I buried greedy fingers and looked through a
medium blue, with that translucent blue, fairy-faint and angel-pure,
that you see in perfection only in the heart of ice. Up again to sun,
wind, and the forest whispers from the shore; down just once more to
see the uncouth anchor stabbing the sand's soft bosom with one rusty
fang, deaf and inert to the Dulcibella's puny efforts to drag him
from his prey. Back, holding by the cable as a rusty clue from heaven
to earth, up to that _bourgeois_ little maiden's bows; back to
breakfast, with an appetite not to be blunted by condensed milk and
somewhat _passé_ bread. An hour later we had dressed the Dulcibella
for the road, and were foaming into the grey void of yesterday, now a
noble expanse of wind-whipped blue, half surrounded by distant hills,
their every outline vivid in the rain-washed air.

I cannot pretend that I really enjoyed this first sail into the open,
though I was keenly anxious to do so. I felt the thrill of those
forward leaps, heard that persuasive song the foam sings under the