I leaned in a sulky mood against the bulkhead. There was a sense upon me as of having been snubbed. I was a young man in those days, of an uncomfortably sensitive disposition. Yet there should have been virtue enough in that glorious morning to soothe in one’s soul a keener sting than was to be inflicted by a handsome woman’s scornful glance. The slight leaning away of the ship from the soft breeze showed a space over the bulwark rails of the sparkling azure under the sun steeping to the delicate silver blue of the sky, with a small star-like point of white in the far-off airy dazzle, marking the topmost cloths of a ship out there. The white planks under my feet had the glistening look of sand, now that the decks had been washed down, and had dried out into a frosting of themselves, as it were, with tiny crystals of brine. The shadows of the rigging in ink-black lines swung sleepily to the motion of the fabric. The Chinaman nurse, in a gown of blue, and wide blue trousers, and primrose-coloured face, and a gleaming tail like a dead black serpent lying down his back, leaned against a carronade, tossing the little baby he had charge of till the plump little sweet crowed again with delight. On the warm tarpaulin over the main-hatch sat the two ayahs, crooning over the infants they held, often lifting their eyes, like beads of unpolished indigo stuck into slips of mottled soap, to the poop, where the mothers of their youngsters were. There was a taste as of a hubble-bubble in the air, with the faint relish of bamboo chafing-gear and cocoa-nut ropes. The hubble-bubble, I daresay, was a fancy wrought by the spectacle of those black faces, and helped by a noise of parrots somewhere aft.