The Beach of Dreams

towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the top-gallant stay-sails shew

rst officer, up and down, pausing now and then for a glance away to windward, now with a

of his little house at Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and neighbours that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He had been dreaming the night before

in, and the tow rope went, and the tug knocked herself to bits, and then the old hooker swung round and there was Mrs

said Mason. "I don't believ

nd. He glanced at the binna

pyramids to where the truck works like a pencil point writing on the sky. Nothing more arresting than the power of the steersman. A turn of the wheel in the hands of Raft would set all that canvas shuddering or thundering, spilling the wind as the water is spilled from a reservoir

batross lay as if

c'sle head to light a pipe he fell in talk with some of the hands, leaning with his b

y name of Ponting w

re'n a boy then. The Yanks used to use that place a lot in those days. The blackest blastedest hole I ever struck. Christmas Island was whe

crew. "It was time of year the sea cows was matin'

ks turned into a passenger tramp, passengers and ponies with a hundred ton of hay stowed forward and the passengers lyin' on their backs on it smokin' their pipes, and the bridge crawled over with passe

anes was a d--d lot t

he would just as soon have fancied himself a railway porter as a hand on a passenger ship. He was one of the old school of m

f the wharf-side. He finished his pi

of sea in his face as he emerged from the fo'c'sle hatch. The wind had shifted and a black squall coming up from astern had hit the ship

loose and the sheeting rain to drown him, but he went on clinging to the top-gallant mast-stays and looking do

reath for a moment and against the wind, Ponting was no

y h

t and Ponting as they lay out on the yard seemed battlin

d, owing to a slackening of the wind, and then, like a brute that had only been waiting to take them by surpri

shrank and they flung themselves on it, it bellied and flung them back, clinging to the lift they saved themselves, attacking it again w

free of him, owing to Ponting and the other fellow not having made good. They clung for a moment without moving, r

d firm, relaxed, banged out again in thunder, developed new hoods and folds as a struggling monster might de

is man, and in that moment the three on the yard had the sail under their chests beating and crushing t

ant sail in dirty weather, and most likely when they got down the Bo'sw'n would call them farmers for being such a

t and away on the port quarter the almost setting sun

itself, was running a vessel under bear poles. The two yellow funnels, the cut of the hull, told Pontin

" he yelled across

's the Gaston de Paree-a

slackness or the time they'd been over their job. The Albatross was running easy and th

for several years acted as deck han

istake them funnels nor the width of them, she's a twenty knotter and the chap that owns her is a king or somethin'; last time I saw her she was off to the China seas, they s

w'n, "but b'God he's got a beauty unde

the Gaston de Paris from whose funnels now the smoke was coming fest

ased to in