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At last our albatross rises high above the coast and speeds swiftly southwards to the small island of Auckland. There he meets his mate, and for several days they are terribly busy in making ready their nest. They collect reeds, rushes, and dry grass, which they knit into a kind of high, round ball. The month of November is come and the summer has begun.
Wan and exhausted, in a terrible state of emaciation, they lifted their hands towards the "Albatross." "Look-out!" shouted Robur. A line was let down, and a pail of fresh water was lowered into the boat. The men snatched at it and drank it with an eagerness awful to see. "Bread, bread!" they exclaimed. Immediately a basket with some food and five pints of coffee descended towards them.
As for the Albatross, he went off without excuse to seek the friends of his past, with which the Mariner has no connection. A premonition of the future came upon me. I remembered the Prince in the fairy tale, who was given by the Fates three magic citrons, and told that each one contained a beautiful sylph, who would appear to him as he cut the rind of her prison.
And I held all afternoon, and through both dog-watches, my dinner served likewise on the deck. And that was all. Nothing happened. The galley-stove smoked three times, advertising the cooking of three meals. Shorty made faces at me as usual across the rim of the for'ard-house. The Maltese Cockney caught an albatross.
But there was much of sadness mingled with their mirth, for they felt that the repast was a peculiarly light one, and they had scarcely strength left to laugh or jest. Next morning they knocked down another bird, and in the evening they got two more. The day after that they captured an albatross, which furnished them at last with an ample supply of fresh food.
That same night he had by force abducted the president and the secretary of the club, and had taken them, much against their will upon a voyage in the wonderful air-ship, the "Albatross," which he had constructed. He meant thus to prove to them beyond argument the correctness of his assertions.
Captain Solomon was standing right behind them, and he was smiling because he had heard what the boys said. And he said that the bird was an albatross, and that little Jacob was pretty nearly right about the length of its wings. Little Sol was taken down a peg and didn't say anything.
Hunt had sailed in the Albatross from Astoria, Mr. M'Kenzie set off with two canoes, and twelve men, for the posts of Messrs. Stuart and Clarke, to appraise them of the new arrangements determined upon in the recent conference of the partners at the factory.
So beautiful were her lines, that you might almost have imagined her a created being that the ocean had been ordered to receive, as if fashioned by the Divine Architect, to add to the beauty and variety of His works; for, from the huge leviathan to the smallest of the finny tribe from the towering albatross to the boding petrel of the storm where could be found, among the winged or finned frequenters of the ocean, a form more appropriate, more fitting, than this specimen of human skill, whose beautiful model and elegant tapering spars were now all that could be discovered to break the meeting lines of the firmament and horizon of the offing.
At Vers I was met by an old man, who insisted upon showing me another cave fortified by the English, after taking the precaution of telling me that he would accept nothing for his trouble. He was long and lean and brown, and had a 'glittering, eye' like the Ancient Mariner, but his conversation was much more cheerful than that of the hero who shot the albatross.
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