I stood still on discovering that our voyage was begun. Our ship had been moored to a buoy; there had been no anchor to weigh, no wild music of seamen nor hoarse quarter-deck commands to give the news of departure to those under deck; the little tug had quietly manoeuvred for our tow-rope, and now the ship's bows were pointing down the river, her keen stem shearing through the froth of the paddle-wheels ahead, with some sailors heave-hoing as they dragged upon the ropes which hoisted certain staysails and jibs; the old town of Gravesend was sliding away upon the quarter. I strained my eyes in vain for a sight of the boat in which my father and Mr. Moore might have been making for the shore. Well perhaps that I could not distinguish her. I think it would have broken my heart then to have seen them, thus, for the last time, making their way ashore for that home I was leaving for months, and perhaps for ever! 'We have started, nurse!' I exclaimed. 'Yes, dear,' she answered. 'Do not make haste to cease crying. Let nature work by degrees in her own fashion. I shall soon see my dear girl looking proudly with health, and oh, the joy of your meeting with your father and Mr. Moore, and my happiness when I see them staring at you, scarce knowing you for your beauty and brightness!' The water blazed with sunshine, the merry twinkling of it by the fresh April wind made the whole Reach a path of dazzling light. Twenty vessels of all sorts were about us: some leaned with rounded canvas soft as sifted snow, with yellow streaks of metal glancing wet to the light out of the brackish foam, that wanted the shrillness and spit of the froth of the brine; some lifted bare skeleton scaffolds of spars and yards as they towed past; some were no bigger than a Yarmouth smack, and some were great steamers and deep and lofty ships from or for the Antipodes. But whatever you looked at was beautiful with the hues of the afternoon, the backing of the green land, the inspiration of the sea, the spirit of ocean liberty wide as the horizon that is boundless, and high as the air through which the clouds blew. CHAPTER IV MARIE BEGINS HER VOYAGE This was the first voyage I had ever made. I was born in England, and was left at school when my mother went round the Cape to India on the second visit my father paid to that country. I had never in my life crossed a wider breast of water than the English Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne. Everything here, then, you will suppose was wonderfully new to me; infinitely stranger indeed than had the ship been a steamer whose funnel and masts have commonly but little in them to bewilder the landgoing eye.