Abreast on the right was a little ship under full sail braced sharp up, tearing through the seas; the red flag of England stood like a board at her mizzen peaks. She was apparently bound home. The water swept in sheets from her steering stem, and every flash of the white brine was magically spanned by a rainbow. She was painted black, and to my land-going eye exactly resembled the 'Lady Emma,' though the practised nautical glance would doubtless have witnessed plenty that distinguished her from the other. I watched her with fascinated gaze, and in deep melancholy, as she swept through the brilliant curls of sea, clouding her path as she dived and scoring the rolling blue astern of her with an arrow-like line of light. Just such sailing as that had Marie described in the fragment of journal we had received. She had named the sails, flung with dexterous pen the very sheen of the lustrous rounds of canvas upon the vision of the mind, painted the picture of the deck, the dark wet length of plank gleaming along the sobbing scuppers at every roll, sailors hanging in the rigging with marling-spikes and coils of small stuff, or stitching on spaces of canvas in the sun, the mate walking the weather side of the deck, her own dear self seated under a short awning talking with her old nurse about the home she was leaving, about the countries she was to visit. I caught my breath with a spasm and turned from the beautiful picture. We were a great number of passengers for so small a vessel. When the fine weather came and the people got their stomachs, no more hospitable scene at meal-time was ever afloat than that saloon of over thirty years ago. There is plenty of finery at sea in this age; but the picturesque is almost dead; it flourished then. Much of the old Indiaman, the old Caper and South Spanier survived in the early steamer. You found this in colours and fittings, and in rig; for, none of us yet making cocksure of the cub of the engine-room, a fabric nigh as spacious and wide as that of the sailing ship was reared to draw from the wind the help the propeller might refuse. This little steamer, too, would go along in an ambling way when it was fine, like any large ship with the wind on the quarter, taking the wide heaves of the deep in a procession of curtseys whilst she fanned the sky with her squares of canvas. I see again the dinner-picture of a fine afternoon: a row of well-dressed people filling the long table; the captain bland and watchful at one end; someone trembling in brass buttons at the other; the claret-coloured light of the setting sun ripples in polished bulkhead and makes rubies of diamonds on moving hands; every shadow sways with slow grace, and the large round cabin windows deepen into dark blue, or glance out in crimson light as the vessel softly rolls them from sea to sky.