The breeze was now very light--sufficient to keep the sails sleeping, and no more. Dennis Donovan, who had that morning paid us a visit, to try whether change of _discomforts_ might not benefit his health, and I were standing together, leaning our arms on the drum of the capstan, and looking out to windward, endeavouring to detect any indication in the dark sky as to the sort of weather we might expect. I was solacing myself with my cheroot, and Donovan was chewing his cud--quid I mean--when I thought I heard something in the air. "Hush! do you hear nothing?" He suspended his mastication, and I took my cigar out of my mouth, and listened all ear--Dennis all mouth--for I could see, dark as it was, that he gaped, as if he expected to catch the sound by the tail in his teeth. "Again--there!"--a faint distant strain of solemn music seemed now to float over head on the gentle night wind, in a low melancholy liquid cadence--increasing like the swell of an Æolian harp, and gradually dying away again, until nothing but the small rushing of the felucca through the water was heard. Startled as I was, still
"It came o'er my soul, like the sweet south, Soft breathing o'er a bed of violets."
And there we stood staring at each other as if we had seen a ghost.
"Pray, Mr Peak," said old Dogvane, the quartermaster (in the small vessel it was a difficult thing to avoid being an eavesdropper sometimes), "what do you think of that?"
"Poo," rejoined little Peak, "the devil, I suppose, is busy aloft."
"_He_ don't often sing psalms on a Sunday evening, does he, Mr Peak?" rejoined old Dogvane.
"Ay, you may laugh, Mr. Peak--you may laugh--but I don't like them kind of sounds thereaway; and mark my words, Master Peak, we shall either have a gale of wind within eight and forty hours"----
"I say, Donovan, that can't be the band on board the frigate?" said Lanyard, who now joined us. His senior laughed outright. "Band--band--why, they might give you a regular _rumpti tumpti_, Dick--but such a piece of sacred music as that was, is altogether out of their line--besides, it was vocal, man--it was vocal."
The weather astern of us was as yet perfectly clear, but gradually the thickest of the pitchy curtain _lifted_ from the horizon on our weather beam, suddenly disclosing the cold, blue star-light sky--which, gradually brightening, with a greenish radiance, gave token that the moon was not far below the horizon, against which the tossings of the dark waves were seen distinctly.