Feathers rode on the thick brown water, curled feathers blown from the coops, carried on breaths of air that shivered the skin of the river.

SHE would be no feather, blown about by every fickle wind of fancy.

We had been walking slowly meantime, and now stopped opposite the harbour office, in sight of the very spot from which the immense captain of the Patna had vanished as utterly as a tiny feather blown away in a hurricane.

At least, there is this comfort about it--that, if we are but feathers blown by the wind, how can the individual feather be blamed because it did not travel against, turn or keep back the wind?

It was suspended upside-down with "shredded feathers" blown at it to give the effect of being under the sea.

A theatrical conceit is immediately and brilliantly established: The feathers, occasionally blown about by a breeze if not a wind, descend as if they always have and always will, evoking a sense of time past and of continuity.