only answered by showing her colours, and held on. All of a sudden the other Indiaman was seen slowly falling off before the wind, as if in scorn at such rude manners, and sure of passing us if she chose. For a moment the red sunset glanced through betwixt all three of her masts, every rope as fine as wire; then the canvass swung broad against it, blood-red from the sun, and she showed us her quarter-gallery, with a glimpse of her stern-windows glittering,--you even made out the crowd of passengers and soldiers on her poop, and a man or two going up her rigging. The sea beyond her lay as blue as blue could be, what with the crimson streak that came zig-zag on both sides of her shadow, and gleamed along the smooth troughs, taking a crest or two to dance on by the way; and what with the rough of it near at hand, where the tops of the dark waves ran hither and thither in broad white flakes, we surging heavily over them. In a few minutes more the sun was not only down, but the clouds banked up to westward, of a deep purple; and almost at once you saw nothing of the other ship, except when a stray streak somehow or other caught her rising, or her mast-heads came across a pale line in the clouds. The breeze got pleasanter as the night went on, and the Seringapatam rattled away in fine style, careening to it by herself. Well, you know, nothing could be better for a good understanding and high spirits amongst us than a fast course, fine weather, and entering the tropics. As for the tropics, if you have only a roomy ship and a good run of wind, as we had, in those latitudes everything outside of you seems almost to have double the stuff in it that air and water have in other places; while _inside_ of one, again, one felt twice the life he had before, and everybody else came out _newer_ a good deal than on the parlour rug at home. As the days got each hotter than the last, and the sea bluer and bluer, we began to think better of the heavy old Seringapatam's pace, teak though she was, and her sole good point right before the wind. Every night she lighted her binnacle sooner, till deuce the bit of twilight there was, and the dark sky came down on us like the extinguisher over a candle. However, the looks of things round and aloft made full amends for it, as long as we held the "Trades;" old Neptune shifting his scenes there so quickly, that nobody missed getting weather and air, more than he could help, were it only a sight of how the Indiaman got on, without trouble to any living soul save the man at the wheel, as one long, big, bright wave shoved her to another, and the slower they rose the more business she seemed to do of herself. By the time they had furbished her up at their leisure, the Seringapatam had a queer Eastern style, too, throughout; with her grass mattings and husky _coir_ chafing-gear, the yellow varnish about her, and her three topsails of country-canvass, cut narrow towards the