The night had been intensely dark, but was now breaking away overhead, where a few stars could be seen twinkling on the patches of half-hid azure sky. All round the horizon, however, but especially to leeward, hung a dark, massy curtain of mist, shrouding everything on the sea-board in impenetrable obscurity, and, like piled up fleeces, laying thick and palpable upon the immediate surface of the ocean, but gradually becoming thinner and lighter as it ascended upwards, until it finally terminated in a thin, gauze-like haze, almost obscuring the stars on the mid heaven above. So dense was the mist in our immediate vicinity, that the man at the helm could not discern the end of the bowsprit; while the upper yards of the brigantine looked like shadowy lines in the gloom. Occasionally, the light breeze would undulate the fog, lifting it for a moment from the water, and disclosing to our sight a few fathoms of the unruffled sea around us; but before a minute had passed the vapors would again settle in fantastic wreaths upon the face of the deep, wrapping us once more in the profoundest obscurity. Not a sound was heard except the occasional rubbing of the boom, the sullen flap of a sail, or the low ripple of the swell under our cut-water, as we stole noiselessly along in the impenetrable gloom. The tread of one of the watch, or the sudden thrashing of a reef-point against the sail, broke on the ear with startling distinctness. Suddenly I heard a noise as of a stifled cry coming up out of the thick fog to leeward, from a spot apparently a few points more on our quarter than the last sound. The boatswain heard it also, and turning quickly to me, he said— “There’s something wrong there, Mr. Parker, or my name isn’t Jack Benson. And look—don’t you see a ship’s royal through the fog there—just over that gun—that shadowy object, like a whiff of tobacco-smoke, down here to the right, is what I mean.” “By heavens! you are right—and—see!—yonder comes her fore-top-mast, rising above the undulating mist.” “Ship ahoy!” hailed the second lieutenant, at that moment appearing on deck, and listening to my report, “what craft is that?” The hoarse summons sailed down to leeward, like the wailing of some melancholy spirit, but no answer was returned. A couple of minutes elapsed. “Ship ah—o—o—y!” sung out the officer again, “answer, or I’ll fire into you—this is the Fire-Fly, an armed vessel of the free state of New York.” “We are a merchantman, belonging to Philadelphia,” answered a gruff voice in reply. “Send your boat on board.” “We can’t,” answered the same voice, “for one of them was washed overboard, three days ago, in a gale, and the other one was swamped.”