Wilfrid stared at his eighteen-pounder as though he were some lad viewing a toy cannon he had just purchased. He bent close to it in his near-sighted way, and looked it all over whilst he asked me what I thought of it. I saw the two fellows who were still at work upon it chew hard on the junks in their cheek-bones in their struggle to keep their faces. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘it seems to me a very good sort of gun, Wilfrid, and a thing, when fired, I’d rather stand behind than in front of.’ ‘I should have had two of them,’ said he with a momentary darkening of his looks to the rising in him of some vexing memory, pointing as he spoke to the bow ports, ‘but Finn thought one piece of such a calibre enough at this end of the vessel, and it would have been idle to mount a stern-chaser; for what we want to fire at--should it come to it--we can always manage to keep yonder,’ nodding in the direction of the jibboom. I had no mind to talk with him in the presence of the two fellows, one of whom I would see screw up his eye like the twist of a gimblet at us whilst he went on polishing; so I stepped into the head to take a view of the shear of the cutwater as it drove knife-like into each green freckled and glass-smooth side of surge rolling transversely from us ere shattering it into a snowstorm; but the bulwarks being too tall to enable me to see all that I looked for, I sprang on to the bowsprit and laid out to the jibboom end, which I jockeyed, holding on to a stay and beckoning to Wilfrid to follow; but he shook his head with a loud call to me to mind what I was about. One may talk of the joy of a swift gallop on horseback when the man and the animal fit like hand and glove, when all is smooth running, with a gallant leap now and again; but what is a flight of that sort compared with the sensations you get by striding the jibboom of such a schooner as the ‘Bride’ and feeling her airily leap with you over the liquid hollows which yawn right under you, green as the summer leaf or purple as the violet for a moment or two, before the smiting stem fills the thunderous chasm with the splendour of a cloud of boiling froth! It was a picture to have detained me an hour, so noble was the spectacle of the leaning yacht for ever coming right at me as it seemed, the rounds of her canvas whitened into marble hardness with the yearn and lean of the distended cloths to a quarter of the sea where hung a brighter tincture of sky through some tenuity of the eastern greyness behind which the sun was soaring. One felt a life and soul in the little ship in every floating bound she made, in every sliding blow of the bow that sent a vast smooth curl of billow to windward for the shrill-edged blast to transform into a very cataract of stars and diamonds and prisms! Lovely beyond description was the curtseying of her gilt figure-head and the refulgence of the gold lines all about it to the milk-white softness that seethed to the hawse-pipes.