I was standing one sultry afternoon, by the weather railing, gazing listlessly over the schooner’s side, and indulging in such reveries as crowd upon the mind in our moments of idleness, when my attention was called to the cry of the look-out that a sail was hovering to windward; and gazing out in that direction I was soon enabled to detect a white speck far up on the seaboard in that quarter, bearing as much resemblance, in the eye of an unpractised observer, to the wing of a sea-gull, as to what we knew it really to be—the royal of a man-of-war. In an instant all was bustle on our decks. The men below poured up the gangway: the skulkers came out from under the sides of the guns; the officers gathered eagerly in a knot abaft the mainmast; spy-glasses were put in requisition, shrewd guesses were made respecting the flag of the stranger, and all the curiosity which the sight of an unknown sail produces on board a man-of-war, was displayed in its full force amongst us. “I think she carries herself like a Frenchman,” said the first lieutenant. “Pardon me,” said the skipper, “but she lifts as if she were an Englishman.” “I could swear her to be a Hollander,” said a lieutenant, who had served a while in the navy of the States. “And were you not all so sure,” interposed a weather-beaten quarter-master, whose boast it was that he had been at sea for more than forty years, “I should say yon saucy braggart was a real Spaniard, such as Kid would have given ten years of his life to be alongside of, for a matter of a bell or so;” and having delivered himself of these remarks, the old fellow coolly turned his quid, and squirted a stream of tobacco juice like the jet of a force-pump, over the schooner’s side. “At any rate, gentlemen,” said the captain, “the stranger doesn’t seem to bring down much of a breeze with him, so that we shall have plenty of time to form our conclusions before it becomes necessary to act. If he should even prove to be an enemy, night may be here before he gets within range, and under cover of the darkness we can easily escape him. The little Fire-Fly has done too much mischief, and been too lucky heretofore, to be lost now.”