I looked over the side and watched the water sweeping past white as milk, with a frequent glitter of beautiful green lights in it. I looked away into the far distance, where the confines of the black plain of the ocean were lost in the darkness of the night, and fixed my eyes upon the stars, which were shining sparely in those dim and distant reaches, and said to myself, Where is my home? Which of all these countless stars is shining down upon my home now? But have I a home? How can I tell, for I do not know who I am? Then I looked up at the swollen, pallid breasts of sails climbing one on top of another into faint, almost visionary spaces where the loftiest were; and whilst I looked I heard two silver chimes ring out of the darkness forward. What can those bells mean? I wondered. How marvellous was the hush upon this great, speeding shadow of a ship, this dim bulk of symmetrical clouds waving its star-reaching heights in solemn measure as though to the accompaniment of some deep spiritual ocean-music, heard by it, but soundless to my ears! Where was the multitude of people who swarmed upon the deck when I had come on board in the morning? I knew they were resting below, and the thought of that great crowd slumbering in the heart of the sweeping, cloud-like shadow at which I gazed awed me; but the emotion changed into one of fear and of loneliness suddenly, and to rally myself I turned and walked towards the after-end of the vessel. The moon was in the west, and the light in the sky that way was the silvery azure which I had witnessed through my cabin porthole. I walked to the extreme end of the ship, where the helm was, and stood by the side of the wheel. When I was on board the French vessel I had always found something fascinating in the machinery of the helm. I used to gaze with childish wonder at the compass-card, steadily in its brass bowl pointing out the little vessel’s course, and I would watch with surprise the instant response of the small fabric to the movement of the wheel. But now as I stood here beside _this_ wheel I surveyed a stretch of deck that seemed measureless, as the white planks, glimmering like sand from my feet went stretching and fading into the obscurity far forward. Behind me, from under the high, dark stern of the ship, rushed the pale and yeasty wake, like a line of pale smoke blowing over the sea. The stars danced in the squares of the rigging; they tipped as with diamond-points the sides of the sails, and they blazed at the summits of the three dim spires of the ship’s masts; and the moon in the west, poised in an atmosphere of delicate greenish silver, trembled a waving fan-shaped stream of light upon the summer pouring of the ocean under her.