The small twinkling lights from millions of lesser stars, in that part of the firmament where she hung, round as a silver pot-lid shield I mean, were swamped in the flood of greenish-white radiance shed by her, and it was only a few of the first magnitude, with a planet here and there, that were visible to the naked eye, in the neighbourhood of her crystal bright globe; but the clear depth, and dark translucent purity of the profound, when the eye tried to pierce into it at the zenith, where the stars once more shone and sparkled thick and brightly, beyond the merging influence of the pale cold orb, no man can describe now----one could, once--but rest his soul, he is dead and then to look forth far into the night, across the dark ridge of many a heaving swell of living water--but, “Thomas Cringle, ahoy where the devil are you cruising to” So, to come back to my story. I went aft, and mounted the small poop, and looked towards the aforesaid moon, a glorious resplendent tropical moon, and not the paper lantern affair hanging in an atmosphere of fog and smoke, about which your blear-eyed poets haven’t so much. By the by, these gentry are fond of singing of the blessed sun--were they sailors they would bless the moon also, and be--to them, in place of writing much wearisome poetry regarding her blighting propensities. But I have lost the end of my yarn once more, in the strands of these parentheses. Lord, what a word to pronounce in the plural!--I can no more get out now, than a girl’s silk worm from the innermost of a nest of pill boxes, where, to ride the simile to death at once, I have warped the thread of my story so round and round me, that I can’t for the life of me unravel it. Very odd all this. Since I have recovered of this fever, every thing is slack about me; I can’t set up the shrouds and backstays of my mind, not to speak of bobstays, if I should die for it. The running rigging is all right enough, and the canvass is there; but I either can’t set it, or when I do, I find I have too little ballast, or I get involved amongst shoals, and white water, and breakers--don’t you hear them roar?--which I cannot weather, and crooked channels, under some lee-shore, through which I cannot scrape clear. So down must go the anchor, as at present, and there--there goes the chain cable, rushing and rumbling through the hausehole. But I suppose it will be all right by and by, as I get stronger. “But rouse thee, Thomas! Where is this end of your yarn, that you are blameying about?” “Avast heaving, you swab you--avast--if you had as much calomel in your corpus as I have at this present speaking--why you would be a lad of more mettle than I take you for, that is all.--You would have about as much quicksilver in your stomach, as I have in my purse, and all my silver has been quick, ever since I remember, like the jests of the gravedigger in Hamlett--but, as you say, where the devil is the end of this yarn?”