It was middle watch at the time; but as soon as I came up I saw all was quiet--Webb near the gangway talking to the old Lascar serang, and breaking the English wonderfully betwixt them; while the Lascars of the watch were sitting like tailors in a ring on the forecastle planks, each waiting for his turn of one cocoa-nut hookah, that kept hubble-bubbling away gravely under the smoker's nose, as he took a long suck at it, while the red cinder in the bowl lighted up his leathery Hindoo face and mustache like a firefly in the root of a banian, till he handed it, without even a wipe, to his neighbour. These fellows had begun to get much livelier as we made the tropics; and this same serang of theirs had put out his horns once or twice to Snelling lately, though he drew them in again the moment he saw me--a sulky old knotty-faced, yellow-eyed devil I thought him at any rate, while his dish-cloth of a turban, his long blue gown and red trousers, reminded you at sea in a gale of a dancing dervish. The day we spoke the Indiaman, in fact, I noticed there was something in the wind for a minute or two with him and his gang, which put it in my head at first to offer them to the captain for a couple of good English hands; and as I passed him and Webb this time, the serang stopped his talk, and sidled off. However, a beautiful night it was, as ever eye looked upon even in the blue Indian Ocean: the heavens cloudless, the full round moon shining high off our weather-beam again, the stars drawn up into her bright light, as it were, trembling through the films of it like dew-drops in gossamer of a summer morning: you saw the sea meet the sky on every hand, without a speck on the clear line of horizon, through the squares of our ratlins and betwixt the schooner's two long fore-and-aft booms. A pretty strongish breeze we had, too, blowing from east to west with a sweep through the emptiness aloft, and a wrinkling ripple over the long gentle swells, as deep in the hue as if fresh dye came from the bottom, and crisping into a small sparkle of foam wherever they caught it full. Something pleasant, one couldn't say what, was in the air; and every sheet being hauled taut to hold wind, the slant gush of it before her beam drove her slipping ahead toward the quarter it came from, with a dip down and a saucy lift of her jibs again, as if she were half balanced amidships, but little noise about it. I took a squint aloft and an overhaul all round, and nothing was to be seen. The size of the sky through the moonlight looked awful, as it were, and the strength of the breeze seemed to send a heavenly blue deep into the western quarter, till you saw a star in it. The night was so lovely, in fact, it somehow made one think of one's mother, and old times, when you used to say your prayers. Still I couldn't see the mate of the watch on the weather quarterdeck, which surprised the more in Jones's case, since he was always ready for me when I came up; and,