It was a soft sunny morning when, some ten days later, I stood on the white deck of the _Lady Jane_, taking, very earnestly, and indeed with unexpected emotion, my last look at the town and harbour of Ramsgate. The brig lay at the mouth of the eastern entrance to the basin, and already, with the gentle northerly breeze filling her broad white topsails, she was beginning to tug impatiently at the great hawser by which she was tethered to a stone post on the quay. On board all was bustle and apparent confusion. Chain sheets rattled, blocks squealed, coils of rope thumped on the deck, and the branch pilot rushed about the vessel, as Moloney said, “like a dog at a fair”; while on the quay, a stout red-jowled harbour official stood and bellowed unceasingly--apparently from sheer excess of animal spirits. “Are ye all clear there?” shouted the pilot, darting on to the forecastle to take a last look at the head-sails. “Are ye all clear aft--here, you! leave that trys’l be--we don’t want him yet. Are ye all clear?” “All clear,” growled the mate. “Cast off the sternfast, Mr. Giles,” roared the pilot, and the official, having deliberately hitched the great bowline off the post, announced that it was “All gone” in a voice like the report of a forty-eight pounder. As the hawser fell with a splash into the water, the quay with the little crowd of onlookers began slowly to move away--as it seemed to me; and as the brig gathered way the whole scene around seemed to glide past like the shifting picture from a magic lantern. All the familiar objects--the clock tower, the row of freshly-painted buoys on the quay, the sun-lighted obelisk and the tall church steeple, the tide ball up on the cliff and the crowded masts in the basin, began to fade away and grow small in the increasing distance; while a musical tinkle arose from under the vessel’s bows, and the water astern began to be dimpled with eddies and tiny whirlpools. Then for a moment the lighthouse loomed up high above our deck, and the grey pier heads, lined with a throng of gaily-dressed girls, slipped quietly by and, leaving the dead water of the harbour, we met the soft swell of the bay, which the _Lady Jane_ saluted with a stately curtsey. I stood by the taffrail gazing, with my heart in my mouth, at the receding land, the clustering town above the white cliff--now grown so strangely dear--and the dwindling harbour, and rapidly reviewing the events that had occurred since my momentous meeting with Captain Bithery.