one thursday evening at limoise, just before the inevitable hour for my departure, i went up alone to the large, old room on the second floor in which i slept. first i leaned out of the open window to watch the july sun sink behind the stony fields and fern heaths that lay towards the sea, which though very near us was invisible. these sunsets at the end of my thursday holidays always overwhelmed me with melancholy.
during the last minutes of my stay i felt a desire, one i had never known before, to rummage in the old louis xv bookcase that stood near my bed. there among the volumes in their century-old bindings, where the worms, never disturbed, slowly bored their galleries, i found a book made of thick rough old-fashioned paper, and this i opened carelessly. . . . in it i read, with a thrill of emotion, that from noon until four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 20th of june, 1813, south of the equator, in longitude 110 and latitude 15 (between the tropics, consequently, and in the middle of the south pacific ocean) there was fair weather, a beautiful sea, a fine southeast breeze, and in the sky many little clouds called “cat-tails,” and that alongside the ship dolphins were passing.
he who had seen the dolphins pass, and who had recorded the fugitive cloud forms had doubtless been dead for many years. i knew that the book was what is called a ship's log-book, one in which seafaring people write every day. its appearance did not strike me as strange, although i had never before had one in my hand. but for me it was a wonderful and unexpected experience to thus suddenly come into a knowledge of the aspect of the sea and sky in the midst of the south pacific ocean, at a given time in a year long past. . . . oh! for a glimpse of that beautiful and tranquil sea, of those “cat-tails” that dotted the deep blue arch of the sky, and of those dolphins that swiftly traversed the lonely southern waters!
in this sailor's life, in this profession so terrifying (a career forbidden to me), how many delightful things happened! i had never until this evening realized it with such intensity.
the memory of that hasty little reading is the reason why, during my watches at sea, whenever a helmsman signals a passage of dolphins, i have always turned my eyes in their direction to watch them; and it has always given me a peculiar pleasure to note the incident in the log-book, differing so little from the one in which the sailors of june, 1813, had written before me.
