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Our storm-sails were made of stout canvas, and the fine-weather ones of American cotton canvas, a most beautiful material, extremely light, yet so close woven that not a breath of the faintest breeze was lost, and they were white as snow.
The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed. The wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great dark blue seas the ship cut a swathe of curded foam. The horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck. We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time.
The breeze freshened and the sea curled its white tops into angry combers Captain Macvie walked the starboard quarterdeck with an air of dignity and luxury of dress that would have called forth the supreme contempt of his associates of earlier days. They would have stigmatized him as a fine-weather dandy, and not a true British sailor.
With little room in which to turn, the Spray, in gathering headway, scratched the paint off an old, fine-weather craft in the fairway, being puttied and painted for a summer voyage. "Who'll pay for that?" growled the painters. "I will," said I. "With the main-sheet," echoed the captain of the Bluebird, close by, which was his way of saying that I was off.
Peck, to sit at his table and had observed with pleasure that his seamanship had the grace, not universal on the Atlantic liners, of a fine-weather manner. "They don't waste much time your friends in there," he said, nodding in the direction in which he had seen me looking. "Ah well, they haven't much to lose." "That's what I mean. I'm told she hasn't."
That day I had intended to live intensely and quietly, basking in the weather's glory which would have lent enchantment to the most unpromising of intellectual prospects. For a companion I had found a book, not bemused with the cleverness of the day a fine-weather book, simple and sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend.
The passengers of whom the Southern Cross carried twenty in her saloon were mustered, in their fine-weather toggery, on the poops of the two ships, eyeing each other curiously at intervals, but chiefly intent upon the impending ceremony of "speaking," the two captains having established themselves in their respective mizen-rigging.
This symptom of approaching change merely consisted in the gathering in the heavens of a thin veil of mottled, fine-weather cloud, just dense enough to obscure most of the lesser stars and render the night rather dark, while a few of the brighter stars peeped through the openings between the clouds at tolerably frequent intervals, permitting us to steer our course without having recourse to the lantern or compass.
During the very wet weather at Newera Ellia I sometimes take the pack and bivouac for a fortnight in the fine-weather country. About a week previous I send down word to the village people of my intention, but upon these occasions I never give them the elk.
"Never mind," said Pencroft, "though I do not see the land, I feel it... it is there... there... as sure as the fact that we are no longer at Richmond." But the fog was not long in rising. It was only a fine-weather mist. A hot sun soon penetrated to the surface of the island. About half-past six, three-quarters of an hour after sunrise, the mist became more transparent.
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