For many days we met with very beautiful weather, and every day the sun grew hotter and hotter. The moon enlarged and became a full moon, and the prospect of the dark blue night, with the moon shining higher in the heavens than ever I had seen her shine, and the stars in multitudes of brilliants trembling in a very sheet of silver down to the vague, obscure line of the horizon, was glorious and wonderful. Often on those fine nights, instead of going to bed, I’d creep to the forecastle, where nobody walked but the sentry and a seaman on the look-out. There I would overhang the head rail and gaze down at the star-white foam as it spread out with a soft, boiling noise from the steady, shearing thrust of the cutwater. The sea was full of fire and many strange shapes of dim, greenish flame swept past in the black water as I looked. The moonlight lay upon the sails and they rose stirless as carvings in marble. The stars glittered like jewels in the dark arches under the sails and twinkled gem-like along the black lines of the yards, and danced like the mystic fire of the corposant beyond the trucks to the swaying of the fragile points of masthead. Oh, it was at such times as these that I longed for Tom! What happiness, I would think, to have his hand in mine; to be standing here at his side, gazing up with him at the moon-whitened canvas, or watching the sea-fire leaping in sparks amidst the rushing froth on either hand! He had talked once of my going a voyage with him. He had talked, too, of his carrying me to sea when we were married. I could understand what I had lost when I stood lonely on that dark forecastle watching the yearning breasts of canvas leaning from the wind and thinking of the home that was low down behind the sea. My heart beat with passion when, on these lovely moonlight nights, sweet with the strong blowing of the trade-wind, I’d think of my dear one locked up in the ’tweendecks below--imprisoned with the rest of them since half-past six, to emerge from the pestilential atmosphere at daybreak--for what? Whilst I thus thought, I’d clench my hands in the agony of my mind till the nails were driven into the palms of them. But everything went along very quietly. Tables were knocked together, and schools held on deck in the inclosure; that is, a proportion of the schools. There was not room for all, and the convict classes alternated between the ’tweendecks and the main-deck. The doctor speedily found out that Tom was one of the best educated of the prisoners, and set him to help in teaching the many wretches who knew not their alphabet. But it rarely happened, as I have said, that I saw my sweetheart. Either I was at work in the cuddy when he was on deck, or he was below, or the schools broken up when I might have found leisure to watch him.