The White Blot by Henry Van Dyke — Read

As it happened, the means for such a quest were at my disposal. I / was part owner of a boat which had been built for hunting and fishing / cruises on the shallow waters of the Great South Bay. It was a / deliberate, but not inconvenient, craft, well named the Patience; and my / turn for using it had come. Black Zekiel, the captain, crew, and cook, / was the very man that I would have chosen for such an expedition. He / combined the indolent good-humour of the negro with the taciturnity of / the Indian, and knew every shoal and channel of the tortuous waters. He / asked nothing better than to set out on a voyage without a port; sailing / aimlessly eastward day after day, through the long chain of landlocked / bays, with the sea plunging behind the sand-dunes on our right, and the / shores of Long Island sleeping on our left; anchoring every evening in / some little cove or estuary, where Zekiel could sit on the cabin roof, / smoking his corn-cob pipe, and meditating on the vanity and comfort of / life, while I pushed off through the mellow dusk to explore every creek / and bend of the shore, in my light canoe.

There was nothing to hasten our voyage. The three weeks' vacation was / all but gone, when the Patience groped her way through a narrow, crooked / channel in a wide salt-meadow, and entered the last of the series / of bays. A few houses straggled down a point of land; the village of / Quantock lay a little farther back. Beyond that was a belt of woods / reaching to the water; and from these the south-country road emerged to / cross the upper end of the bay on a low causeway with a narrow bridge / of planks at the central point. Here was our Ultima Thule. Not even / the Patience could thread the eye of this needle, or float through the / shallow marsh-canal farther to the east.