Our progress was slow. For some while we carried strong winds, which swept us onwards into the softer climates of the Pacific; they then failed us, and were followed by a succession of light airs, as often ahead as astern. I was astonished, however, by the yacht-like qualities of motion of the little barque. Through weather that had scarcely weight enough in it to have stirred the _Countess Ida_, the _Lady Blanche_ would sneak over a surface of water that was often glass-like, ripples fine as wire breaking away from her keen stem, and a short wake scoring the liquid smoothness under her counter; her topsails and courses motionless, save but for their soft swaying to the long and gentle respiration of the swell; a faint lifting, however, perceptible in the light cloths of the loftier sails, which were doing the work of the rest, and communicating to the little fabric out of the delicate softness of the blue Pacific heavens, so to speak, an impulse of vitality, the recollection of which would move me to amazement when I found that our progress in the twenty-four hours had been as considerable as the Indiaman would have got out of a pleasant breeze. But not to linger upon this time—though I could tell much of my incessant intimate association with Miss Temple—dwell with delight, untinctured by recollection of the miseries and anxieties of this passage, upon the memory of the soft and lovely nights of those delicious parallels, the clear dusk radiant with the glistening of stars from sea-line to sea-line, the mild atmosphere, sweet with dew, the hush upon the slumbering leagues of the deep, soothing as a benediction to the perturbed spirit, the play of delicate fires in the water, the stirring of canvas in the still gloom aloft, as of the brushing of the pinions of hovering creatures: then the wide blue sparkling scene of day, the barque clothed in the ivory whiteness of her canvas striking a prismatic shadow of pearl from her white sides and silken heights into the opalescent profound, on which she would rest as on a bed of glass, some distant fountain and curve of wet black body denoting the rising of a leviathan from the depths—ah! had all been well with us, this would have made a noble time for the memory to muse on—but my story draws me to its conclusion. It was February the 18th, as very well indeed do I remember. From the hour of our having sighted the whaler off Cape Horn, we had met with nothing, not even of the bigness of the tip of the wing of a sea-fowl, to break the continuity of the sea-line, no shadow of low-lying land, no vision of star-like space of water indicating the froth of the submerged reef. On this day at noon, having worked out my calculations, I discovered that the distance to Braine’s island, as I may call it, from the then situation of the barque, was to be traversed, if the light air held as it was, in about twelve hours; so that it would be proper to keep a lookout for it at about midnight.