On the lee-bow was a dash of orange light, much less like the sails of a ship than a feather of vapour bronzed by a sunset and vanishing in the tail of a cloud. ‘How does she head, Finn?’ cried Wilfrid to the skipper, who was viewing her through a long, heavy, powerful glass of his own. ‘Coming dead on end for us, sir.’ ‘What’ll she be, captain?’ said I. He eyed her a bit, and answered, ‘A square rig, sir; a bit of a barque, I dare say.’ My cousin suddenly slapped his leg--one of his favourite gestures when a fit of excitement seized him. ‘Charles,’ he bawled, ‘we’ll speak her. D’ye hear me, Finn? We’ll speak her, I say!’ ‘Ay, ay, sir,’ cried the captain. ‘She may have news for us,’ Wilfrid proceeded; ‘it is about time we fell in with something that has sighted the “Shark.”’ ‘A bit betimes, sir,’ said Finn, touching his cap and approaching to give me his telescope which I had extended my hand for. ‘Confound it, man!’ cried Wilfrid, in a passion, ‘everything’s always too soon with you. Suppose by this time to-morrow we should have the schooner in sight--what then, hey? What would be your arguments? That she had no business to heave in sight, _yet_?’ Finn made no answer, but pulled his cap off to scratch his head, with his lips muttering unconsciously to himself to the energy of his secret thoughts, and his long face, which his mouth seemed to sit exactly in the middle of, working in every muscle with protest. The distant vessel was showing in the glass as high as the curve of her fore-course, with now and again a dim sort of refractive glimmer of wet black hull rising off a head of sea into an airy, pale length of light that hung in a low gleam betwixt the junction of sea and sky. The sun was westering though still high, but his orb was rayless, and the body of him looked no more than an oozing of shapeless yellow flame into the odd sky that seemed a misty blue in places, though where it appeared so you would notice a faint outline of cloud; and as he waned, his reflection in the wind-wrinkled heave of the long head-swell, seemed as if each broad soft brow was alive with runnings of flaming oil.