star, low down in the sky, seemed to flicker,
faintly and more faintly, for half a dozen seconds, and then disappear.

"The dawn is coming, sir," I whispered to the skipper, by whose side I
was sitting, "and in another minute or two we ought to--ah! there she
is. Do you see her, sir?" And I pointed in the direction of a faint,
ghostlike blotch that had suddenly appeared at a spot some three points
on our port bow.

"Where away?" demanded the skipper, instinctively raising his hand to
shade his eyes; but he had scarcely lifted it to the height of his
shoulder when he too caught sight of the object.

"Ay," he exclaimed, "I see her. And a big craft she is, too; a barque,
apparently. Surely that cannot be the craft that we are after? Yet it
looks very like her. If so, she must have slipped out of the river with
the last of the land-breeze last night, and lain becalmed all night
where she is. Now what are the other boats about that they have not
seen her? Parkinson," to the coxswain, "show that lantern for a moment
to the other boats, but take care to shield it with--ah! never mind,
there are both their lights. Give way, men. Put me alongside under her
mizen chains, my lad. Either side; I don't care which."

While the captain had been speaking the faint, ghostly glimmer that I
had detected had resolved itself into the spectral semblance of a large
ship clothed from her trucks down with canvas upon which the rapidly
growing light of the advancing dawn was falling and thus rendering it
just barely visible against its dark background of sky.

In the tropics day comes and goes with a rush, and, even while the
skipper had been speaking, the object which had first revealed itself to
me, a minute earlier, as a mere wan, ghostly suggestion had assumed
solidity and definiteness of form, and now stood out against the sky
behind her as a full-rigged ship of some seven hundred and fifty tons
burthen, her hull painted bright green, and coppered to the water-line.
She was lying stern-on to us, and sat deep in the water, from which
latter fact one inferred that she had her cargo of slaves on board and
had doubtless, as the skipper conjectured, come out of the river with
the last of the land-breeze during the previous night, and had remained
becalmed near us, and, we hoped, quite unaware of our proximity all
night. She was now within a cable's length of the boats, but, lying as
she was, dead stern-on to us, we in the gig wer