It was in the aqueous light of that dim hour before dawn when Kanaris awoke him. The air was tingling and cold, and the mist of the night was drifting eastward. Between them and Tenedos to the west, a mile away, the sea view was clear; in front a little mist still hung between them and the nearest Turk; a furlong off farther to the east it was still thick. Kanaris had a smile for him. "Look," he said; "it is already clearing. Wet your finger, and you will feel it cold from the west. Oh, Mitsos, my dream is true: the wind will be here with the dawn. It and the dawn are waking together." Mitsos sniffed with head thrown back. "It is so," he said; "I smell it." "There are two ships near us," said Kanaris, "both of the biggest kind. The farther one you and I take, the nearer the Psarians. Pray God, they are not utterly fools. With wind I would burn that ship with a tobacco-pipe." Mitsos smiled sleepily but hugely. "A fine big tobacco-pipe is this caique," he said. "Are the sails fastened?" "I have done all while you slept," said Kanaris. "Look and see if it satisfies you. The turpentine only remains. There are the cans; we will do that now. After that no more tobacco." "That is the drawback to fire-ships," said Mitsos. Kanaris had nailed the sails to the mast so that they would stay there burning till all the canvas was consumed, and fastened the yards with chains so that they too would blaze until they were entirely burned, and not drop. The brushwood he had piled in the bow, half-mast high, and it only remained to pour the cans of turpentine over sails, deck, and fuel. Even as they were thus employed the stars paled, and were quenched, and with the first definite saffron light in the east a sudden shiver shook the sails, and the boat lifted and moved a little. After a moment another whisper came from the east; the sails flapped, and then began to draw. Kanaris and Mitsos went to the stern, and then Kanaris took the rudder, while Mitsos kindled an oil-lamp and soaked a little dry moss with turpentine, wherewith to fire the ship. A sudden rose flush leaped up to the zenith from the east; the boat rose to a new-born ripple and came down with a cluck into the trough of it; one star only, as if forgotten, hung unextinguished in the sky. The wind had yet scarcely reached the Turkish ships, and they still hung on their anchors, their stern swung round by the current, presenting a starboard broadside to the wind, which now blew shrill and steady, taking the caique along with hissing forefoot and strained canvas. Already Kanaris and Mitsos had passed under the bows of the first Turkish ship, and were not a hundred yards from the second when the Psarian sailors set light too soon to their fire-ship, and, jumping into the boat they towed behind, rowed away. Kanaris gave one grunt of dissatisfaction, for he saw that they had miscalculated their time, and that the fire-ship would only just catch in the bowsprit of the Turk,