nes from the gale to dart along an easier course, glided swiftly
away, quartering the crests of the waves, or sinking gracefully into their
troughs, as she yielded to the force of a wind that was now made to be
favourable. The sea rolled on, in a direction that was no longer adverse
to her course; and, as she receded from the breeze, the quantity of sail
she had spread was no longer found trying to her powers of endurance.
Still she had, in the opinion of all her crew, quite enough canvas exposed
to a night of such a portentous aspect. But not so, in the judgment of the
stranger who was charged with the guidance of her destinies. In a voice
that still admonished his inferiors of the danger of disobedience he
commanded several broad sheets of studding-sails to be set, in quick
succession. Urged by these new impulses, the ship went careering over the
waves; leaving a train of foam, in her track, that rivalled, in its volume
and brightness, the tumbling summit of the largest swell.

When sail after sail had been set, until even Wilder was obliged to
confess to himself that the "Royal Caroline," staunch as she was, would
bear no more, our adventurer began to pace the deck again, and to cast his
eyes about him, in order to watch the fruits of his new experiment. The
change in the course of the Bristol trader had made a corresponding change
in the apparent direction of the stranger who yet floated in the horizon
like a diminutive and misty shadow. Still the unerring compass told the
watchful mariner, that she continued to maintain the same relative
position as when first seen. No effort, on the part of Wilder, could
apparently alter her bearing an inch. Another hour soon passed away,
during which, as the log told him, the "Caroline" had rolled through more
than three leagues of water, and still there lay the stranger in the west,
as though it were merely a lessened shadow of herself, cast by the
"Caroline" upon the distant and dusky clouds. An alteration in his course
exposed a broader surface of his canvas to the eyes of the spectators, but
in nothing else was there any visible change. If his sails had been
materially increased, the distance and the obscurity prevented even the
understanding Earing from detecting it. Perhaps the excited mind of the
worthy mate was too much disposed to believe in the miraculous powers
possessed by his unaccountable neighbour, to admit of the full exercise of
his experienced faculties on the occ