abandonment of herself to the impulse and the spirit of what she viewed, assured me that if ever old Ocean owned a daughter, its child was the pale, blue-eyed, yellow-haired maiden who sat with rapt gaze and swift respiration at my side.

Jacob, who had been eyeing the ship listlessly, suddenly started into an air of life and astonishment.

'Whoy, Tommy,' cried he, grasping the rail and staring over the stern, out of his hunched shoulders, 'pisen me, mate, if she ain't the Thermoppilly!'

Thomas slowly and sulkily turned his chin upon his shoulder, and after a short stare, put his back again on the ship, and said: 'Yes, that's the Thermoppilly, right enough!'

'The Thermopylae?' said I. 'Do you mean the famous Aberdeen clipper?'

'Ay,' cried Jacob, 'that's her! Ain't she a beauty? My oye, what a run! What's agoing to touch her? Look at them mastheads! Tall enough to foul the stars, Tommy, and de-range the blooming solar system.'

He beat his thigh in his enjoyment of the sight, and continued to deliver himself of a number of nautical observations expressive of his admiration and of the merits of the approaching vessel.

She had slightly shifted her helm, as I might take it, to have a look at us, and would pass us close. The thunder of the wind in her towering heights came along to our ears in the sweep of the air in a low continuous note of thunder. You could hear the boiling of the water bursting and pouring from her bows: her copper gleamed to every starboard roll on the white peaks of the sea along her bends in dull flashes as of a stormy sunset, with a frequent starlike sparkling about her from brass or glass. How swiftly she was passing us I could not have imagined until she was on our quarter, and then abreast of us--so close that I could distinguish the face of a man standing aft looking at us, of the fellow at the wheel, of a man at the break of the short poop singing out orders in a voice whose every syllable rang clearly to our hearing. A crowd of seamen were engaged in getting in the lower studdingsail, and this great sail went melting out against the hard mottled-blue of the sky as the clipper stormed past.

Jacob sprang on to a thwart, and in an ecstasy of greeting that made a very windmill of his arms shrieked rather than roared out, 'How d'ye do, sir?--how d'ye do, sir? How are ye, sir? Glad to see ye, sir!'

The man 

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