ee
its occupant, on his handsome and capacious brass bedstead, under a most
beautiful embroidered silk coverlet, and surrounded by everything that
heart could wish for, lying there wan, peevish, irritable, dissatisfied
with everybody and everything, seemingly because his doting parents had
gratified his every whim and humoured his every caprice. It was quite
evident that he regarded me with almost if not quite as great distaste
as ever; he even seemed to consider it a grievance that he owed his life
to a despised Britisher; and seeing how acutely his mother was
distressed at his ungracious manner toward me, I contented myself by
saying a few words of sympathy with him on his illness, and brought my
visit to a speedy close.

Five bells in the afternoon watch had just been struck, and I was once
more on duty, when a man who had been sent aloft to attend to some small
matter hailed the deck from the main topsail yard to report that, some
ten miles distant, and broad on our weather beam, there was something
that had the appearance of a dismasted wreck. In reply to this the
skipper, who was on deck, requested Kennedy to take the ship's telescope
up into the main topmast crosstrees and ascertain what the object really
was. This was done; and in due time the mate came down and reported
that the object, as seen through the glass, proved to be a biggish lump
of a craft, either a ship or a barque, totally dismasted, with the
wreckage of her spars still floating alongside, and to all appearance
derelict. We at once hauled our wind, and shortly afterward tacked; and
by eight bells we were up with the wreck and hove to within biscuit-toss
to leeward of the craft. Then Briscoe, the second mate, in charge of
one of the whalers, was sent away to give the derelict--for such she
seemed to be--an overhaul.

The craft was a wooden vessel, of about our own tonnage, painted black
with a broad white ribbon chequered with false ports; she had a Dutch
look about her; and, from her model, was evidently somewhat elderly.
She had been ship-rigged, and from the appearance of the wreckage
alongside had been caught unawares, very probably by the recent
hurricane, and dismasted. She had a short, full poop, and as she rolled
heavily toward us we caught sight of what looked like the shattered
framework of a deckhouse close abaft the stump of her foremast; also,
there were the remains of two boats dangling from davits on her
quarters; from all of