within a coil of rope I sat for most of the day, and revelled in my mercies. It was a world of motion—splendid, unimpeded, exultant; only to be aware of it was power; to share it was to be ten times alive. The clean wind blew and blew, and the clouds raced before it; the great merry waves leapt high into the air, as they came chasing after us, and shoals of porpoises rollicked along in the bright clear water on either side of the vessel as though they recognised in her a playmate—now vigorously rolling their bright black bulks in and out the sparkling surface, now like a company of pale green meteors streaming swiftly below and through it. (“With all our knowledge we don’t come near their power,” old Mr. Quin mused aloud, as he leaned over the side to watch them.) And, with all these forces of Nature, the little Tikirau, as she hastened along upon her routine business, with her humble and homely cargo and us humdrum folk aboard, seemed somehow freely to be one. Elemental, spontaneous, gleeful, she too appeared; she was an incarnate joy, a sea-spirit of delight, a spark of perennial and quenchless activity, somehow encased in canvas and iron and timber; she was—I don’t know what she was! but she looked like a bit of Nature; she behaved like a live thing; she felt like a friend, and I loved her! Ships are like horses and people—they have a very definite personality of their own, readily to be felt by those susceptible in such matters. And, of all the ships that I have ever known, the little Tikirau stands out in my fond remembrance as easily the kindliest, the happiest, and the sweetest-natured.
The day after this, we made our first port, and
