The vessel ahead was steering dead for us, her masts in one. She was much smaller than I had supposed from the first glimpse I caught of her from the masthead--a little brig, apparently, her cloths showing out rusty to the brilliance as she neared us, albeit afar they had shone like a star of white fire. Her hull was of a dirty yellow--a sort of pea soup colour, and the foot of her foresail was spread by a bentinck boom. She was without an atom of interest in my eyes--a small foreigner, as I supposed, sluggishly lumbering home to some Spanish or Italian port with her forecastle filled with chocolate-coloured Dagos, and the cabin atmosphere poisonous with the lingering fumes of bad cooking. Wilfrid and Finn stood looking at her together, the latter raising a glass to his eye from time to time. I knocked the ashes out of my bowl and crossed over to them. ‘It will be strange if she has any news to give us of the “Shark,”’ said I. ‘We will speak her, of course,’ said Wilfrid. ‘Looks as if she meant to give us the stem,’ exclaimed Finn, with a glance aft at the fellow at the helm; ‘she is steering dead on for us as if her course were a bee-line and we were athwart it.’ ‘I expect she’ll not be able to talk to you in English,’ said I. ‘What is her country, do you think, Mr. Monson?’ asked Miss Jennings, closing her volume and joining us. ‘Italian. What say you, captain?’ ‘Well, I can’t rightly tell what she is,’ he answered, ‘but I know what she ain’t--and that’s English.’ He stepped aft, bent on the ensign, and ran it aloft. ‘Does she see us?’ exclaimed Wilfrid; ‘really she is steering as if she would run us down.’ I took the captain’s glass and brought it to bear. She was bow on, and there was no sign of a head over the forecastle rail--nothing living in the rigging or upon the yards either; the foresail concealed the run of her abaft. ‘She appears derelict,’ said I, ‘with her helm secured amidships, and blowing like the wind--as she listeth.’ ‘Time to get out of her road, I think,’ grumbled Finn. ‘Down hellum!’ The turn of a spoke or two brought the stranger on the lee bow. Then it was that, on taking another view of her through the glass, I observed a couple of men standing near a jolly-boat, that swung at a pair of heavy wooden davits like a Nantucket whaler’s on the quarter. One of them wore a red cap resembling an inverted flower-pot; the other, whilst he addressed his companion, gesticulated with inconceivable vehemence. ‘Foreigners of a surety!’ said I; ‘they’ll have no news for us.’