At last broke the day. Melancholy is daybreak at sea. There is nothing sadder in nature; nothing that so sinks the spirits of the watcher who suffers himself to be visited by the full spirit of the sight. On shore there is the chirrup and harmonies of birds, the rosy streaking of the sky over the hilltops; the vane of the church spire burns, the cock crows heartily, the farmyard is in motion, the smell of the country rises in an incense as the sun springs into the sky. But at sea the cold iron-gray of the breaking morn is reflected in the boundless waste. There is nothing to catch the light of the springing sun save the clouds. The vast solitude brims into the unbroken distance, and cold is the ashen sky and cold the picture of the ship, as it steals out of the darkness of the night. The melancholy, however, is but in the dawn’s beginning. When the sun rises, there is a splendor of colors at sea which you will not find ashore. The ocean is a mirror that reverberates the light of day. Times are when the deep flings its own prismatic glories upon the sky. This have I marked at sunrise, when the flash of the luminary has sunk into the heart of the sea, when all is blueness and dazzle below, and, above, a sky of high-compacted cloud, delicate as flowers and figures of frost and snow upon a windowpane, charged with the colors of the great eye of ocean looking up at it. “There’s the island,” said I to myself. I snatched up the glass, and resolved the tiny piece of shading upon the horizon into the proportions of the ugly rock of cinders. It was twelve or fourteen miles distant down on the lee quarter. “The deuce!” thought I. “What has been our drift? Where has the brig been running to? And yet Greaves told me he could trust Bol!” I looked through the skylight, and immediately the captain, who lay upon the locker, opened his eyes and fastened them upon me. “The island is in sight, sir.” “How far distant?” I made answer. He asked a few questions, then bade me shift the brig’s helm for the rock to complete our watering. Twenty minutes later we were standing once more for the island, with all plain sail heaped upon the brig, and a quiet air of wind blowing dead on end over the taffrail. CHAPTER XX. WE START FOR HOME.