We went to the rail to look, I, for one, glad enough to change the subject, for it was nothing less than profanity to be arguing with so sweet a little woman as this--in the pure white shining of the moon, too, and with something of an ocean freshness of atmosphere all about us--on such a gangrenous subject as the elopement of Lady Monson with Colonel Hope-Kennedy. Out of all my sea-going experiences I could not pick a fairer picture than was made by the brig we were passing, clad as she was in moonlight, and rising in steam-coloured spaces to mere films of royals motionless under the stars. She was a man-of-war; the white of her broad band, that was broken by black ports, gleamed like the ivory of pianoforte keys; her canvas was exquisitely out and set, and trimmed as naval men know how--one yardarm looking backwards a little over another, the rounded silent cloths, faint in the radiance with a gleam as of alabaster showing through a delicate haze, and high aloft the tremor of a pennant like the expiring trail of a shooting star. All was as hushed as death upon her; her high bulwarks concealed her decks; nothing was to be seen stirring along the whole length of the shapely, beautiful, visionary fabric that, as we left her slowly veering away upon our quarter, looked to lose the substance of her form, as though through the gradual absorption of the light her own white canvas made by the clearer and icy radiance of the soaring moon. ‘To think now,’ said I, ‘of the thunder of adamantine lips concealed within the silence of that heap of swimming faintness! How amazing the change from the exquisite repose she suggests to the fierce crimson blaze and headlong detonations of a broadside flashing up the dark land and dying out miles away in a sullen roar. But, d’ye know, Miss Jennings, I shall grow poetical if I do not light another cigar. Women should encourage men to smoke. Nothing keeps them quieter.’