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The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday, and the blue of evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: the happiest thing in colour—sparkling, vague, newborn—the blue of heaven and youth.

“What are you looking for, Paddy?” asked Dick.

“Say-gulls,” replied the prevaricator; then to himself: “Not a sight or a sound of them! Musha! musha! which way will I steer—north, south, aist, or west? It’s all wan, for if I steer to the aist, they may be in the west; and if I steer to the west, they may be in the aist; and I can’t steer to the west, for I’d be steering right in the wind’s eye. Aist it is; I’ll make a soldier’s wind of it, and thrust to chance.”

He set the sail and came aft with the sheet. Then he shifted the rudder, lit a pipe, leaned luxuriously back and gave the bellying sail to the gentle breeze.

It was part of his profession, part of his nature, that, steering, maybe, straight towards death by starvation and thirst, he was as unconcerned as if he were taking the children for a summer’s sail. His imagination dealt little with the future; almost entirely influenced by his immediate surroundings, it could conjure up no fears from the scene now before it. The children were the same.