THE VINEYARD
narrow end of the gulf, but it slackened and dropped between three and four in the morning, and daylight found them becalmed, with slack sails, some cight miles out to sea, and nearly opposite Itea. To the north the top of Parnassus wore morning on its face, and stood high above them rose-flushed with dawn, while they still lay on a dark, polished plain of water as smooth as glass. On the opposite side of the gulf, but farther ahead, Cyllene and Helmos, on the north side of which last winter's snow still lay heraldically in bars and bezants, had also caught the light, which, as the sun rose higher, fiowed like some luminous liquid down their slopes, wooded below with great pine forests.
Nicholas had pillowed himself on the deck, and woke when the sun had risen high enough to touch the caique. The captain and owner of the bout, who had been all night in the little close cabin below, came up as he roused himself and sat down near him.
"The wind has dropped altogether," he said; "we may be here for hours. Are you in a hurry to get on?"
Nicholas filled his pipe very carefully.
"I am never in a hurry," he said, "if I am going as quick as I can. I would make a wind if I could, but I cannot, and so I am content to wait. If swearing would do any good I would even swear, but I find it has no cffcct on the clements. You have a good heavy cargo."
"A good, heavy cargo?" said the man. "Yes, and we should have a dipping gunwale if those devils had not seized six crates of figs at Corinth."
"The Turks?" asked Nicholas.
"Who else? Port dues, they call them. Much of a port is Corinth—a heap of stones tumbled into the water, and five rickety steps."
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