It is old-fashioned stuff to write about! yet your grandfathers managed very handsomely with it, _somehow_, old stuff as it is. It’s the city of Amsterdam that is shored up and held on end by piles; so does the constitution of this country rest on the boarding-pike. You clap a trident in the hand of your goddess of the farthing and the halfpenny. Why not a boarding-pike? _That_ is Britannia’s own symbol. It was not with a trident that this invincible goddess charged into the channels, and swarmed over the bristling and castellated sides of her thrice-tiered thunderous enemies, and swept all opponents under hatches and battened them down there. It was the boarding-pike that did _that_ work. But a weapon, the most victorious of all in the hands of the British tar, is doomed, I fear. Its fate is sealed. The giant Steam has laid it across his knee, and waits but to fetch a breath or two to break it in twain. Be it so. But laugh at me not as an old-fashioned proser when I say that it will be an evil day for England when the boarding-pike shall have been stowed away as a weapon that can be no longer serviceable in the hands of the British Jacks. We ran the ensign aloft; the schooner took no notice. Some breathing of air down her way enabled her to slightly gain upon us. She sneaked her hull up the sea to the strake of her water line, but she was end on, and little was to be made of her. It then fell a sheet calm, and the stranger at that hour might have been about five miles astern of us. It was a little after four in the afternoon. The heat was fierce. The planks of the deck burnt like hot furnace-bricks through the soles of the shoes, the pitch bubbled between the seams, and in the steamy vapor that rose from the brig’s sides the lines of her bulwark rails snaked faking to her bows as though they were alive. The very heave of the sea fell dead; at long intervals only came a rounded slope sluggishly traveling to us, brimming to the sides of the brig, slightly swaying her, and making you think, as it rolled dark from t’other side of the vessel, of the sullen rising of some long, scaly, filthy monster out of the ooze to the greasy chocolate surface of a West African river. “What is that?” suddenly exclaimed Greaves, who had been standing at my side looking at the schooner. I pointed the glass. “A boat, sir,” said I. “A minute--I shall be able to count her oars. Five of a side. She is a big boat and full of men.” He took the telescope from me and leveled it in silence. “She is a privateersman,” said he. “There’s nothing of the man-o’-war in the rise and fall of those blades; and if yonder oarsmen are not foreigners, my name is Bartholomew Tulp. Fielding, those scoundrels must not arrest this voyage, by Isten! There is nothing for them to plunder. They will cut our throats and fire the brig. Oh, blow, my sweet breeze! What sort of a gunner are you?” “A bad gunner,” I answered.