I brought the lady Aurora on deck for a walk, when the sun had been sunk about half an hour. All hands were enjoying the moonlight and the quiet weather. They paced in couples; they came together in groups and halted for a yarn; the hum of their conversation was a deep and eager note; but all the talk was subdued--I caught no sudden calls. Now and again a man laughed, and there was a frequent lighting of pipes by the flames of burning rope-yarns. The brig was made an ivory carving of by the moon. Every plank might have been chiseled out of the tusk of the elephant. Stars of silver glittered and swam in the glass of the skylight. The swell came along like folds of ink, but as every shoulder of black water swung into the glory of the moon’s wake it flashed into a shining hill, and the splendor of those vast shapes was the more wonderful for the blackness out of which they rolled and the blackness in which they vanished. Miss Aurora walked by my side; presently the play of the deck obliged her to take my arm. Galen had charge; he stepped to leeward out of the road of our weather walk and lay against the rail abreast of the wheel. The weariness of the sea was in that man’s figure. As he stood there or leaned, the mere posture only of the clothes and the fat of him expressed with extraordinary force the sickening monotony, the profound dullness of the calling of the sea as that calling was in those years. The iteration of the ocean line; the ceaseless groan and heave of the timber fabric under one’s foot; the eye-wearying flight of the sails to the masthead; the weeks and months of the same thing over and over again, ocean and sky, darkness and light, the weeping of mist, roar of wind, the cold of the dawn; the beef and the pork, the pork and the beef--it was _all_ in that Dutchman’s figure. After we had walked the deck for half an hour the señorita informed me that she felt cold, and that the movements of the ship made her legs ache, and she proposed that we should go below and that I should give her a lesson in English. When we had entered the lighted cabin she saw in my face that I was in no particular humor to teach her English just then. She was quick in reading me: this had come about through much of our talk having been carried on with our faces. In truth, while I had walked with her on deck my thoughts had gone to Bol’s questions about the disposal of the money, and my spirits had drooped a bit.