And at last came bearing down on the bottle, the ship from the North that might have been Destiny's own. Under the overhanging stern were the letters,—"Mary Ann, Salthaven, Mass.," and from its quarterdeck a child perilously leaned over the rail, piping in the smallest of trebles:
"Daddy, see the bottle—it's dancing on the waves!"
But the bottle with the insistent message, of course, never answered at all, or clamoured, or even dislocated the cork in its neck, through any effort to be heard.
So shark and wreckage, spar and life-belt, tree and seaweed, flower and dead men, floated by. So cape and headland, and suns and storms, and winds and tides and seasons, passed; and countless tiny white wings in the blue above, and the great white wings of the ships on the blue beneath, and still the unthinking bottle danced gaily, almost sportively, on the waves.
