The Patagonia was slow, but she was spacious¹ and comfortable, and there was a kind of motherly decency² in her long, nursing rock and her rustling³, old-fashioned gait. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We were not numerous enough to squeeze each other and yet we were not too few to entertain — with that familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great bare field of the ocean, beneath the great bright glass of the sky. I had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at all; but now I had a revelation of how, in a midsummer mood, it could please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and imperturbably⁴ quiet — save for the great regular swell⁵ of its heart-beats, the pulse of its life, and there grew to be something so agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation⁶ and leisure that it was a positive satisfaction the Patagonia was not a racer. One had never thought of the sea as the great place of safety, but now it came over one that there is no place so safe from the land. When it does not give you trouble it takes it away — takes away letters and telegrams and newspapers and visits and duties and efforts, all the complications, all the superfluities and superstitions⁷ that we have stuffed into our terrene life. The simple absence of the post, when the particular conditions enable you to enjoy the great fact by which it is produced, becomes in itself a kind of bliss⁸, and the clean stage of the deck shows you a play that amuses, the personal drama of the voyage, the movement and interaction, in the strong sea-light, of figures that end by representing something — something moreover of which the interest is never, even in its keenness, too great to suffer you to go to sleep. I, at any rate,

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