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As I cast my eyes round, something glittered brightly just for a moment in one of the pools. Rising with renewed strength, I scrambled, faster than I had moved before, towards it, and great was my delight to see a good-sized fish floundering in the pool. It attempted to escape me, but I pounced down upon it as a sea-bird would have done, and, giving it a blow on the head, quickly despatched it.
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost, for an instant, the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be borne upward, like a floating sea-bird, on the long heaves and swells of sound.
"Oh! if I had my gravity," thought she, contemplating the water, "I would flash off this balcony like a long white sea-bird, headlong into the darling wetness. Heigh-ho!" This was the only consideration that made her wish to be like other people. Another reason for her being fond of the water was that in it alone she enjoyed any freedom.
Between her panting breaths Nance whistled a low soft note like the pipe of a sea-bird. A like sound came softly up from below, and slipping and stumbling again, they were on the beach among mighty boulders girt with dripping sea-weed. Another low pipe out of the darkness, and they had found the boat and tumbled into it, wet and bruised, and breathless.
"Hrrrrrr!" and they were ten or twelve feet. At thirty yards the Hounds were slipped an even slip; some thought it could have been done at twenty yards. "Hrrrrrr! Hrrrrrrr!" and the Warhorse was doing fourteen-foot leaps, not a spy-hop among them. "Hrrrrr!" wonderful Dogs! how they sailed; but drifting ahead of them, like a white sea-bird or flying scud, was the Warhorse.
It was a golden key that opened it. For Raleigh promised, if he were set free, to seek once more the fabled Golden City, and this time he swore to find it and bring home treasure untold to his master the King. So once more the imprisoned sea-bird was free, and gathering men and ships he set forth on his last voyage. He set forth bearing with him all his hopes, all his fortune.
The feature of his experiences which most strikes the reader now, is the extraordinary courage and pugnacity of the natives. They took the Endeavour for a gigantic white-winged sea-bird, and her pinnace for a young bird. They thought the sailors gods, and the discharge of their muskets divine thunderbolts.
This fiction has been kept up during the whole voyage, and on dark nights at the beginning of the seal-fishing it was only with great difficulty that men could be induced to do their spell. No doubt what they heard was either the creaking of the rudder-chains, or the cry of some passing sea-bird.
He was about to resume his solitary watch, for he could not sleep on such a night, when his eye was attracted by a flitting shadow weaving to and fro astern; it seemed to be soaring upon the face of the waters; was it some broad-winged sea-bird following in their wake? He watched it as it drew near, growing larger and larger every moment. No! it was not a bird; but it was the next thing to one.
Leaning forward, she bent her head, putting her lips to the image of the flying sea-bird which so intrigued her loving curiosity and those three letters tattooed in blue and crimson upon the back of his hand. "There there" she murmured, as soothing a child "does this convince you?" But here broke off, her heart contracting with a spasm of wondering tenderness.
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