through the ebony-black mangrove branches, dazzling the eye and tipping the ripples with a long line of scintillating gold which stretched clear from the shore to the boat, flooding her and those in her with primrose light. Quickly the golden spark grew and brightened until, before one could draw breath a dozen times, it had expanded into the upper edge of a great throbbing, burning, golden disk, flooding land and sea with its golden radiance--and it was day. The sea changed from purple to a clear translucent green; the vegetation ashore, still black immediately under the sun, merged by a thousand subtle gradations, right and left, into olive-green of every imaginable tint, and finally into a delicate rosy grey in the extreme distance; a multitude of trivial details of outline and contour, tree and rock, suddenly leapt into distinctness, a flock of pelicans rose from among the cluster of islands inshore and went flapping heavily and solemnly out to seaward; the dorsal fin of a shark drifted lazily past the boat--and the full extent of the bight behind the island of Baru swept suddenly into view. "Just in time," exclaimed Marshall, with a sigh of relief, as he rose and stretched himself. "Round with her, lad, and head her up the bight while the wind lasts. It will be a flat calm here in half an hour from now." "I hope not," said Dick, "for this bight is quite twelve miles long, by the look of it, and it will be no joke for four of us to be obliged to pull this heavy boat the greater part of that distance." "There will be no need," said Marshall. "We are not in such a desperate hurry as that amounts to. Take the boat close in under the shore of the island, and when the wind fails us we will anchor and have breakfast. The calm will probably last no longer than about an hour; then will come the sea breeze, which, I should say, from the trend of the coast just here, will probably draw right up the bight, and be a fair wind for us."