And now I must tell you here that my little dandy yacht, the _Spitfire_, was so brave, staunch, and stout a craft that, though I am no lover of the sea in its angry moods, and especially have no relish for such experiences as one is said to encounter, for instance, off Cape Horn, yet such was my confidence in her seaworthiness, I should have been quite willing to sail round the world in her, had the necessity for so tedious an adventure have arisen. She had been built as a smack, but was found too fast for trawling, and the owner offered her as a bargain. I purchased and re-equipped her, little dreaming that she was one day to win me a wife. I improved her cabin accommodation, handsomely furnished her within, caused her to be sheathed with yellow metal to the bends, and to be handsomely embellished with gilt at the stern and quarters, according to the gingerbread taste of twenty or thirty years ago. She had a fine, bold spring or rise of deck forward, with abundance of beam, which warranted her for stability; but her submerged lines were extraordinarily fine, and I cannot recollect the name of a pleasure craft afloat at that time which I should not have been willing to challenge, whether for a fifty or a thousand mile race. She was rigged as a dandy, a term that no reader, I hope, will want me to explain. I stood, cigar in mouth, looking up at her canvas and round upon the dark scene of ocean, whilst, the lid of the skylight being a little way open, I was almost within arm's reach of my darling, whose lightest call would reach my ear, or least movement take my eye. The stars were dim away over the port quarter, and I could distinguish the outlines of clouds hanging in dusky, vaporous bodies over the black mass of the coast dotted with lights where Boulogne lay, with the Cape Gris Nez lantern windily flashing on high from its shoulder of land that blended in a dye of ink with the gloom of the horizon. There were little runs of froth in the ripples of the water, with now and again a phosphoric glancing that instinctively sent the eye to the dimness in the western circle as though it were sheet lightning there which was being reflected. Broad abeam was a large, gloomy collier "reaching" in for Boulogne harbour: she showed a gaunt, ribbed, and heeling figure, with her yards almost fore and aft, and not a hint of life aboard her in the form of light or noise.