It is Sunday, and I lie under the awning by the engine-room door, lazily reading "Faust." There is a speck on the sky-line--the mail boat, bringing a letter from my friend. I look round at the translucent opal of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on the reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I listen to the dull roar of the breakers, to the solemn tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the bar, and the complaisant "_ah-ha-a-a_" of some argumentative penguin. Even the drab-coloured African hills in the distance, and the corrugated Catholic church (shipped in sections) with the sun blazing on its windows, are beautiful to me to-day, for I am not of those who think religion is ugly because it is corrugated, or that hills are repulsive because they are not in the guide-book. I am at peace, and so are the rest. My friend the Mate is fishing, but that, of course, is trite; the Mate is always fishing. I fancy the cod nudge each other and wink when they see his old face looking down into those opalescent depths, and watch him feeling at his lines for a bite. How they must have joked together this morning when he gave a shout and called for help, for he could not lift the line! We all responded to the call, and the line came up slowly. "Must be a whopper," muttered the Mate, and refused my callous suggestion that it was a coal-bag which had got entangled in the hook. At last, after an eternity of hauling, came up part of an iron bedstead, dropped from some steamer in the long ago. But the true fisherman has reserves of philosophy to cope with such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Meanwhile the speck has enlarged itself into a blot with a tag above it and some cotton-woolly smoke. "'Tis the _Nautilas_," observes the Mate, and he calls it "Naughty Lass" with hibernian unconsciousness of his own humour. I wonder, now, why it is that we sailor-men invariably display such frantic _feminine_ interest when another craft heaves in sight. The most contemptible fishing boat in the Bay of Biscay, when she appears on the horizon, receives the notice of all hands--the old as well as the young. And when we pass a sister ship, the _Aretino_ or the _Cosimo_ or the _Angelo_; in mid-ocean, we talk about her and criticise her, and rake out her past history, for days. I sometimes think, from hints the Mate drops, that our own _Benvenuto_ has a past, a St. John's Wood past I mean, not a Haymarket past. But he will have no talk by others against the ship. "What's the matter with the ship?" he will shout. "Damn it all, I like the ship! She's a good old ship, an' I glory in her!" So we talk scandal about the others instead.