‘Mr. Dugdale,’ he exclaimed, in a rough, congratulatory voice, ‘you’ve done wonderfully well, sir. By ——! but I don’t think there’s e’er a navigator would have struck it true as a hair as ye have. Ye’ve got no doubts now left, I allow?’ and I saw his face darken with the wrinkles of the grin that overspread his countenance. ‘What’s to follow?’ I demanded, thinking to take advantage of his mood. ‘Why, the gold,’ he answered, ‘the money, sir; what we’ve been a-waiting for; and what I suspects we’ll most of us know what to do with when we gits it.’ ‘And then?’ ‘That’ll be a matter for consideration,’ he answered, drawing off and going to the rail and staring ahead. ‘Back the topsail yard and bring the ship to a stand, Mr. Lush,’ said I, ‘and get a cast of the lead, will you?’ These orders were immediately obeyed. The lead ran out to the whole scope of line without touching bottom. There was nothing now to be done but to wait for daylight. A whole eternity seemed to pass before the dawn broke. Then to the sifting of the dull gray faintness over the rim of the eastern sea, the land came stealing out, till, to the sudden soaring of the sun into the clear blue sky of the Pacific morning, it flashed out into its full proportions and distinctive features not a mile off our port beam as we then lay with our maintopsail aback. The crew, neglecting all discipline and shipboard habit, were assembled in a body on the poop; and thus we all stood looking, I a little distance away from them with Miss Temple at my side. It was a small coral island, apparently of the dimensions that Captain Braine had named. To the northward the smooth water brimmed to a long shelf of coral grit, lustrous as snow in the sparkle of the early sunshine. There was a small rise, green with vegetation, in the centre of the island; how far distant, I could not imagine. Almost abreast of us, the land went in with a semicircular sweep like to a horseshoe, and was exactly the lagoon that had been described by Captain Braine. In the centre of it, just as he had marked the thing down upon his chart, rose a coral formation of the appearance of a very thick pillar, and at the distance from which we surveyed it, it might easily have passed for a monument of white stone erected by human hands, the decorated summit of which had been rudely broken off by a tempest or some volcanic shock. On a line with this pillar, some little distance up the beach of the lagoon, were several clumps of trees. There was a deal of a sort of stunted vegetation going inland from the margin of the little bay, coarse grass, as my telescope made out, tangles of bushes, and so on.