The anchor was hauled in, and the dream of my life began. I was like a mad thing on board there. I couldn't grow weary questioning the hands on the use of this and that, though they probably grew weary answering me. For the most part they were kindly enough, though they dashed my enthusiasm somewhat by their oaths and scolding. But they seldom laid hands on me. It may have been that they were afraid to do so knowing me under the protection of Dirk, a master to daunt the boldest. But I think too I was popular on my own account. I was hardy and bold, and could swarm a back-stay as easily as run up the ratlines. Also I was willing and eager to take my share of the work, and so relieved the lazier ones of many a climb aloft. And my precocity with the knife and pistol amused them, and I could talk of strange things when we lounged about the galley in the dog-watches which appealed to their sailor-sense of the mysterious. For a few days the world was an enchanted playground. The sky was a serene blue, with here and there lazy woolly clouds floating over us like argosies from fairyland. The wind was steady enough to swell the sails without rolling us boisterously amid toppling waves. And the water cutting away from the bows in a gush of leaping white, and foaming out in a double wake to either side; the slapping of the waves against the vessel, and spurting up in little fountains to the deck; the long racing lines of the rollers, glittering with innumerable greens and blues, and in the evening catching the colours of the west and flaming suddenly into orange and red and purple; the mist on the sea's face in the morning, like a white veil filmy and shifting and translucent, and gleaming like cloudy mother-of-pearl as the sun strengthened and shot it through with colour, to furl it up like a banner of gauze till it melted and left the skyline clear, so that once again to the sweep of the horizon were the dancing waters and the wide free kingdom of the air; all these things which were the wonder and beauty of the sea caught at my heart like a passion, till I thought I should like to live for ever amid this inconstant wavering mystery, this intangible fluctuant loveliness, which teased my spirit like a thirst and fired it like a wine. But this has little to do with my story, though I should like to dilate on the joy of it all. For even when the sky clouded and the storm caught us, the thunder rolling ponderously overhead like a caravan of the giants, and the lightning stabbing at us out of the black heavens, ripping the clouds across in savage jagged gashes, I still exulted, being ignorant, and fighting on the high unsteady yards with the stiff kicking sails thought that life was a wonderful game.