So intensely still was it, and so perfectly transparent was the surface of the deep, that had it not been for the long swell already alluded to, we might have believed the surrounding universe to be a huge blue liquid ball, and our little ship the one solitary material speck in all creation, floating in the midst of it.
No sound broke on our ears save the soft puff now and then of a porpoise, the slow creak of the masts, as we swayed gently on the swell, the patter of the reef-points, and the occasional flap of the hanging sails.

An awning covered the fore and after parts of the schooner, under which the men composing the watch on deck lolled in sleepy indolence, overcome with excessive heat.

Bloody Bill, as the men invariably called him, was standing at the tiller, but his post for the present was a sinecure, and he whiled away the time by alternately gazing in dreamy abstraction at the compass in the binnacle, and by walking to the taffrail in order to spit into the sea.

In one of these turns he came near to where I was standing, and, leaning over the side, looked long and earnestly down into the blue wave.
This man, although he was always taciturn and often surly, was the only human being on board with whom I had the slightest desire to become better acquainted.

The other men, seeing that I did not relish their company, and knowing that I was a protege of the captain, treated me with total indifference.