“It is a wonderful sight,” said I, gazing with astonishment, not wholly unmixed, at the mighty whiteness that was coming along. Already on high the verge of the startling milky reflection was over our fore royal masthead. You might look straight up now and see no stars. The line of the flaring whiteness upon the sea was a little more than a mile distant. The wind blew softly, and before it the brig floated onward, meeting the coming whiteness with an occasional flap of canvas that fell upon the ear like a note of alarm from aloft. “Did you never before see the white water, Fielding?” exclaimed Greaves. “Never, sir.” “I have sailed through it three times,” said he. “Once off Natal, once in Indian, and once in China seas. I did not know it was to be met with on this side the world; but everything is probable and possible at sea. I tell you what, Bol,” he exclaimed, calling across to the Dutchman, who had gone to the side to stare, and was holding on to a shroud, or backstay, with his big body painted black as ink against the whiteness that was coming along, “I believe I am mistaken, after all. It is not a star; it is an insect.” “I likes to handle dot insect. I likes her in der forecastle to read by und light my pipe by,” said Bol, with a coarse, heavy, uneasy laugh, that sounded like the bray of an ass. “It is a subglobular insect,” said Greaves, nudging me again, “compressed vertically, convex above, concave beneath, wrapped in a transparent coriaceous envelope, containing a white, gelatinous substance. Repeat that to the men, Bol, will you, should the whiteness make them uneasy. Very few sailors,” said he, addressing me, and talking without appearing in the least degree sensible of the wonderful and alarming milk-white light that was now almost upon us, “take the trouble to scientifically examine what passes under their noses. What, for example, is more often under a sailor’s nose than bilge water? An Irish skipper once asked me what bilge water was. I told him that it was sulphuretted hydrogen, hydrosulphate of ammonia, oxide of iron, and compounds of lead and zinc. ‘Jasus,’ said he, ‘and is that how you spell shtink in English?’”