By-and-by the moon--her orb now reduced to less than half its full dimensions--stole ghostlike above the horizon; and by her wan light we saw that a host of soft, fleecy clouds--shaped like the smoke belched from the mouth of a cannon upon a windless day--were mustering their squadrons in the eastern quarter; and we knew them for the welcome trade-cloud, the sure indication that the breeze we now had would be a lasting one. And so it proved; for the fleecy masses soared upward until they overspread the whole of the visible sky; and as they soared so the breeze hardened, until at length, by the time that the middle watch drew toward its close, the saucy _Esmeralda_, with the wind well over her starboard quarter, and everything packed upon her, from the royal studding-sails down, was storming through it at a pace nearer to sixteen than to fifteen knots in the hour, while the wild weird melody of a hundred harps singing through the taut mazes of her rigging aloft mingled with the roar of the wind out of the great spaces of her straining canvas, and the deep, continuous thunder of the bow wave, raising a concert of such mad, soul-stirring harmony as causes the sailor's heart to leap and bound within him in ecstatic exultation to the swift, buoyant leaps and plunges of the good ship beneath him. This truly royal breeze continued to blow with scarcely diminished strength, enabling us to reel off our fifteen knots per hour for hours at a time, while our speed seldom sank below twelve; the result of which was that a little before midnight of the fifth day from its first reaching us we glided into the roadstead of Honolulu, and came to an anchor.