y had
an eye for the nautical situation of the stranger; "and we should be none
the worse for being a dozen leagues more to the eastward, ourselves. If
the wind holds here at east-by-south-half-south we shall have need of all
that offing. I got jammed once between Hatteras and the Gulf"--

"But, do you not perceive that she is where no vessel could or ought to
be, unless she has run exactly the same course with ourselves?"
interrupted Wilder. "Nothing, from any harbour south of New York, could
have such northing, as the wind has been; while nothing, from the Colony
of York would stand on this tack, if bound east; or would be here, if
going southward."

The plain-going ideas of the honest mate were open to a reasoning which
the reader may find a little obscure: for his mind contained a sort of
chart of the ocean, to which he could at any time refer, with a proper
discrimination between the various winds, and all the different points of
the compass. When properly directed, he was not slow to see, as a mariner,
the probable justice of his young Commander's inferences; and then
wonder, in its turn began to take possession of his more obtuse faculties.

"It is downright unnatural, truly, that the fellow should be there!" he
replied, shaking his head, but meaning no more than that it was entirely
out of the order of nautical propriety; "I see the philosophy of what you
say, Captain Wilder; and little do I know how to explain it. It is a ship,
to a mortal certainty!"

"Of that there is no doubt. But a ship most strangely placed!"

"I doubled the Good-Hope in the year '46," continued the other, "and saw a
vessel lying, as it might be, here, on our weather-bow--which is just
opposite to this fellow, since he is on our lee-quarter--but there I saw a
ship standing for an hour across our fore-foot, and yet, though we set the
azimuth, not a degree did he budge, starboard or larboard, during all that
time, which, as it was heavy weather, was, to say the least, something out
of the common order."

"It was remarkable!" returned Wilder, with an air so vacant, as to prove
that he rather communed with himself than attended to his companion.

"There are mariners who say that the flying Dutchman cruises off that
Cape, and that he often gets on the weather side of a stranger, and bears
down upon him, like a ship about to lay him aboard. Many is the King's
cruiser, as they say, that has turned her hands up from a sweet sleep,
when the