woman,
and the wind, freshening momentarily in a squall, made one think of the
spirit of Nature as eager to purify the air of heaven from the taint of
the dead pirate's passage from the bulwarks to the water's surface.

All that day and through the night that followed the schooner drove,
rolling and plunging before the seas, into the north-east, to the
pulling of the spritsail. I made several excursions into the fore-hold,
but never could hear the sound of water in the vessel. Her sides in
places were still sheathed in ice, but this crystal armour was gradually
dropping off her to the working of her frame in the seas, so that, since
she was proving herself tight, it was certain her staunchness owed
nothing to the glassy plating. I had seen some strange craft in my day;
but nothing to beat the appearance this old tub of a hooker submitted to
my gaze as I viewed her from the helm. How so uncouth a structure, with
her tall stern, flairing bows, fat buttocks, sloping masts,
forecastle-well, and massive head-timbers ever managed to pursue and
overhaul a chase was only to be unriddled by supposing all that she took
to be more unwieldy and clumsy than herself. What would a pirate of
these days, in his clean-lined polacca or arrowy schooner, have thought
of such an instrument as this for the practice of his pretty trade? The
ice aloft still held for her spars and rigging the resemblance of glass,
and to every sunbeam that flashed upon her from between the sweeping
clouds she would sparkle out into many-coloured twinklings, marvellously
delicate in colour, and changing their tints twenty times over in a
breath through the swiftness of the reeling of the spars.

I should but fatigue you to follow the several little stories of these
hours one by one; how I got my food, snatched at sleep, stood at the
helm, gazed around the sea-line and the like. Just before sundown I saw
a large iceberg in the north, two leagues distant; no others were in
sight, but one was enough to make me uneasy, and I spent a very troubled
night, repeatedly coming on deck to look about me. The schooner steered
herself as if a man stood at the helm. The spritsail further helped her
in this, for, if the curl of a sea under her forefoot brought her to
larboard or starboard, the sail forced her back again. Still, it was a
very surprising happy quality in her, the next best thing to my having a
shipmate, and a wonderful relief to me who must otherwise have brought