Then the _Spindrift_ would press forward, her spars creaking slightly, tiny ripples playing round her bows, a double line of oily bubbles in her wake.

Again the impulse would fail her, and she would lie still among the palpitating jellyfish, perfectly reflected in the water beneath her; but carried steadily on by the silent shoreward swelling of the tide.
Major Kent sat at the tiller smoking.

He was in that mood of vacant obliviousness of the ordinary affairs of life which long drifting on calm seas induces.

The helplessness of man in a sailing-ship, when the wind fails him, begets a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable, which is the nearest thing to peace that any of us ever attain.

Indeed to drift along the tide is peace, and no conviction of the inevitableness of the worries which lurk in ambush for us on the land has any power to break the spell.
Meldon lay stretched on the deck outside the combing of the cockpit.
Nirvana had no attraction for him.