However, I borrowed comfort from the reflection that the health of the heartiest maiden might well fail in such an existence as this girl passed, spite of the wine-like invigoration of the salt winds; that she had survived hard upon five years of experiences so wild and amazing that a few weeks had tended not a little to pale my own face and even rob me of something of my manhood; that it was inevitable she should break down from time to time, but that her sweetness would soon bloom and be coloured into a loveliness of health when this Death Ship had become a thing of the past, and when I had safely lodged her as my bride in my mother's pretty home, with flower-gardens and fields to wander in, upon floors unrocked by billows, in rooms irradiated at night by fires never more mystical than the soft flame of oil or the silver of star and moonshine. The weather brightened as the day advanced. By noon the sky had broken into lagoons of blue, with fine large clouds that rained here and there upon the horizon and filled the air down there with broken shafts of rainbow, like to windgalls, only that the colours were very sharp and even glorious. There was now plenty of sunshine to give life and splendour to the ocean, whose dye of azure looked the purer and more sparkling for its cleansing by the great wind and rain and fire-bolts of the past night. The swell of the sea was from the southward, no longer a turbulent movement, but a regular respiratory action, with weight and volume yet that made you think of the deep as a sentient thing, with something of the violence of its hellish conflict yet lurking in its rhythmic breathing. About this hour a number of whales showed their black, wet backs at the distance of a mile. The sunshine turned their spoutings into very beautiful fountains, which fell in showers of diamonds and rubies and emeralds; and their great shapes and solemn movements, with now and again the dive of one with a breathless lingering of tail that showed like a gigantic fan of ebony, or the rise of another, floating its sparkling blackness above the violet fold of a brimming swell, as though a little island had been hove to the surface by some deep-sea convulsion, afforded Imogene and me some twenty minutes of very agreeable diversion. The wind was a trifle to the southward of west, a brisk breeze, and the ship swarmed and swirled and rolled along at a speed of some five or six marine miles in the hour, every cloth abroad and already dried into its usual dingy staring tones. But the pump was worked without intermission. The clanging of the brake upon its pin, the gushing of the bright water flowing to the scuppers and flooding the deck thereabouts with every roll, the hissing of the slender cascades over the side, grew into sounds as familiar as the creaking of the bulkheads, or the cries of the rudder upon its ancient rusty pintles.