The wind lightened towards noon; the fine sailing breeze failed us, and sank into a small air off the larboard beam; the swell of the sea went down, but the colour of the brine was still the same rich sparkling blue of the early morning. I had never seen so deeply pure and beautiful a tint in the ocean in these parallels. It made one think of the Cape Horn latitudes, with the white sun wheeling low, and a gleam of ice in the distant sapphire south. The great masses of cream-soft rainbow-tinctured cloud melted out, and at two o’clock in the afternoon it was a true equinoctial day, and the Indiaman a hot tropic picture, awnings spread, the pitch softening betwixt the seams, a sort of bluish steamy haze lazily floating off the line of her bulwark rail, through which the dim sea-limit showed in a sultry sinuous horizon. The ship rippled through it, clothed to her trucks with cloths that shone with the silver whiteness of stars to the hot noontide effulgence. The ayahs lolled about the quarter-deck, and John Chinaman sat upon a carronade fretting the baby he held into squeals of laughter and temper by tossing to. The old sow grunted with a grave grubbing noise under the long-boat, and fore and aft every cock in the ship was swelling his throat with defiant fine-weather crowings. It was somewhere about three bells that evening--half-past seven o’clock--that I was standing with Mr. Prance at the brass rail that protected the break of the poop, the pair of us leaning upon it, watching a grinning hairy fellow capering in a hornpipe a little abaft the stowed anchor on the forecastle. The one-eyed ape which we had rescued, and which by this time was grown a favourite amongst the seamen, sat low in the foreshrouds, watching the dancing sailor--an odd bit of colour for the picture of the fore-part of the ship, clothed as he was in a red jacket and a cap like an inverted flower-pot, the tassel of it drooping to his empty socket. It was a most perfect ocean evening, the west glowing gloriously with a scarlet sunset, the sea tenderly heaving, a soft warm breathing of air holding the lighter sails aloft quiet. All the passengers were on deck saving Miss Temple, who was playing the piano to herself in the cuddy. In the recess just under me were three or four smokers; and the voice of Mr. Hodder waxing warm in some argument with Mynheer Peter Hemskirk, entered with unpleasant disturbing emphasis into the tender concert of sounds produced by the fiddlers forward, the occasional laughter of the seamen, the tinkling in the saloon, the voices of the ladies aft, the gentle rippling of water alongside, combining, and softened by distance and the vastness amid which the ship floated, into a sort of music.