“Ay, ay,” replied the captain of the steamer, as she rushed by. On Monday evening, a stiff north-west breeze sprung up again, as though determined to keep us away from New York harbor; and it lasted a whole week. On Thursday, the twenty-eighth, after we had been tacking about for three days without gaining much distance, a pilot-boat came dancing out to us, over the rough waves, and a pilot left her in a yawl and came aboard the BREWSTER. “HAVE YOU ANY NEWSPAPERS?” was the question the captain and I asked him, in a breath, as he came up over the bulwark. I shall never forget the anxiety and impatience with which we asked this question. We had been absent from the world, as it were, about three weeks: and so full of terror and danger had the period been that it seemed like a moderate life-time. I almost fancied that my country might have undergone a revolution during my absence, and that I might find it necessary, on going ashore, to bend my solitary knee to a crowned monarch. However, I saw no indications of any such state of things, in the _World_, _Herald_ and _Times_ with which the pilot responded to our earnest inquiries. Things seemed to be going on about as usual in Gotham, and the remainder of the United States: the markets appeared to be good; whisky, cotton and iron were quoted at fair figures: while the usual healthy number of fires, accidents and murders were reported in the proper columns. On Monday morning, the first day of April, having been all this time beating about in front of the harbor, we found ourselves becalmed again, about seventy miles from New York. The sky was heavily clouded, a dull, damp, misty rain fell, and the barometer was low. Every thing augured ugly weather. Soundings were taken, which indicated that we were in fifty fathoms water. Other sails could be seen on all sides. By and by, we saw a small side-wheel steamer coming toward us, from the direction of the harbor; whereupon the captain said to the pilot: “Don’t you think that’s a steamer coming to take us in tow?” “It looks very like it,” was the reply. The captain then called the carpenter and instructed him to remove from the stern of the ship the board on which the name BREWSTER was painted. “What is that for, Captain?” I asked. “Don’t you know?” he replied. “No.” “How dull you are,” said he. “You would be dull, too,” I retorted, “if you had never been out of sight of land but three or four times in your life. But, tell me—what is it for?” “Why, you see, we have already been reported in distress; and if that fellow coming should recognize us, he would ask a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars to tow us in.” “Ah?” said I, somewhat enlightened. “Is that their style?” “Yes, indeed: let them get a fellow in a tight place once, as we are now, and they’ll pile it on—no telling how high.—Hurry, carpenter.” The steamer reached us at last, crossed our stern, and with a graceful curve, came round on our port side, within hailing distance.