of such craft to board
merchant vessels. The Ranger was disguised as a merchantman, presenting
a broad drab-colored belt all round her hull; under the coat of a
Quaker, concealing the intent of a Turk. It was expected that the
chartered rover would come alongside the unchartered one. But the former
took to flight, her two lug sails staggering under a heavy wind, which
the pursuing guns of the Ranger pelted with a hail-storm of shot. The
wherry escaped, spite the severe cannonade.

Off the Mull of Galoway, the day following, Paul found himself so nigh a
large barley-freighted Scotch coaster, that, to prevent her carrying
tidings of him to land, he dispatched her with the news, stern foremost,
to Hades; sinking her, and sowing her barley in the sea broadcast by a
broadside. From her crew he learned that there was a fleet of twenty or
thirty sail at anchor in Lochryan, with an armed brigantine. He pointed
his prow thither; but at the mouth of the lock, the wind turned against
him again in hard squalls. He abandoned the project. Shortly after, he
encountered a sloop from Dublin. He sunk her to prevent intelligence.

Thus, seeming as much to bear the elemental commission of Nature, as the
military warrant of Congress, swarthy Paul darted hither and thither;
hovering like a thundercloud off the crowded harbors; then, beaten off
by an adverse wind, discharging his lightnings on uncompanioned vessels,
whose solitude made them a more conspicuous and easier mark, like lonely
trees on the heath. Yet all this while the land was full of garrisons,
the embayed waters full of fleets. With the impunity of a Levanter, Paul
skimmed his craft in the land-locked heart of the supreme naval power of
earth; a torpedo-eel, unknowingly swallowed by Britain in a draught of
old ocean, and making sad havoc with her vitals.

Seeing next a large vessel steering for the Clyde, he gave chase, hoping
to cut her off. The stranger proving a fast sailer, the pursuit was
urged on with vehemence, Paul standing, plank-proud, on the
quarter-deck, calling for pulls upon every rope, to stretch each already
half-burst sail to the uttermost.

While thus engaged, suddenly a shadow, like that thrown by an eclipse,
was seen rapidly gaining along the deck, with a sharp defined line,
plain as a seam of the planks. It involved all before it. It was the
domineering shadow of the Juan Fernandez-like crag of Ailsa. The Kanger
was in the deep water which makes all round