hick pea-jacket and mittens, which made his hands
appear as large as his feet. His nose was a pug of an intense bluish
red, one tint arising from the present cold, and the other from the
preventive checks which he had been so long accustomed to take to drive
out such an unpleasant intruder. His grizzled hair waved its locks
gently to the wind, and his face was distorted with an immoderate quid
of tobacco which protruded his right cheek. This personage was second
officer and steersman on board of the vessel, and his name was Obadiah
Coble. He had been baptised Obadiah about sixty years before; that is
to say, if he had been baptised at all. He stood so motionless at the
helm, that you might have imagined him to have been frozen there as he
stood, were it not that his eyes occasionally wandered from the compass
on the binnacle to the bows of the vessel, and that the breath from his
mouth, when it was thrown out into the clear frosty air, formed a smoke
like to that from the spout of a half-boiling tea-kettle.

The crew belonging to the cutter, for she was a vessel in the service of
his Majesty, King William the Third, at this time employed in protecting
his Majesty's revenue against the importation of alamodes and
lutestrings, were all down below at their breakfasts, with the exception
of the steersman and lieutenant-commandant, who now walked the
quarter-deck, if so small an extent of plank could be dignified with
such a name. He was a Mr Cornelius Vanslyperken, a tall meagre-looking
personage, with very narrow shoulders and very small head. Perfectly
straight up and down, protruding in no part, he reminded you of some
tall parish pump, with a great knob at its top. His face was gaunt,
cheeks hollow, nose and chin showing an affection for each other, and
evidently lamenting the gulf between them which prevented their meeting.
Both appear to have fretted themselves to the utmost degree of tenuity
from disappointment in love: as for the nose it had a pearly round tear
hanging at its tip, as if it wept. The dress of Mr Vanslyperken was
hidden in a great coat, which was very long, and buttoned straight down.
This great coat had two pockets on each side, into which its owner's
hands were deeply inserted, and so close did his arms lie to his sides,
that they appeared nothing more than as would battens nailed to a
topsail yard. The only deviation from the perpendicular was from the
insertion of a speaking-trumpet under