ten o’clock
To learn how to nurse a small-pox case . '' She was busy at that all the evening , and next morning we were off with a fine ten-knot breeze in the barque _ Rose of Sharon _ for Madeira . For five days we made good time , and were no great way from the island ; but on the sixth there fell a calm , and we lay without motion on a sea of oil , heaving slowly , but making not a foot of way . At ten o'clock that night Emily Vansittart and I stood leaning on the starboard railing of the poop , with a full moon shining at our backs , and casting a black shadow of the barque , and of our own two heads upon the shining water . From the shadow a broadening path of moonshine stretched away to the lonely sky-line , flickering and shimmering in the gentle heave of the swell . We were talking with bent heads , chatting of the calm , of the chances of wind , of the look of the sky , when there came a sudden plop , like a rising salmon , and there , in the clear light , John Vansittart sprang out of the water and looked up at us . I never saw anything clearer in my life than I saw that man .