Our meeting with that snow was rendered memorable by a phenomenal caprice of wind. It was blowing a light breeze off our starboard bow; the hour was about two, the sky was like a sheet of pale blue silver, here and there shaded with curls and plumes and streamers of high-floating yellow-colored cloud. There was wind enough to keep the ocean trembling, but at intervals, and at fairly regular intervals, there ran north and south a number of glassy swathes, oil-calm paths from the remotest of the northern airy reaches to the most distant of the recesses of the south. It was my watch below when we sighted the sail; I had dined. It was soul-consumingly hot in the cabin, and I came on deck to smoke a pipe and lounge amid the brine-sweet draughts of air, and in the pleasant shadows cast upon the white and glaring planks by the quietly breathing sails. Greaves was below. Presently Yan Bol, who was in charge of the brig, approached me. I had watched him staring at the approaching vessel through the ship’s telescope, his vast chest rising and falling under his extended arms, which, clothed as he went--in pilot cloth, though the sun made him no shadow--looked as big as the thighs of an ordinary man. He approached me and said: “Mr. Fielding, didt you belief in impossibilities?” “No, Bol, I don’t; do you?” “By de tunder of Cott, den, I shall for effermore after dis, onless, indeedt, I hov lost der eyes I schipped mit at Amsterdam.” “What’s the matter?” said I. “Coom dis vay, Mr. Fielding, und you see for yourself.” He crossed the deck. I followed him. He put the telescope into my hands and leveled a square fat forefinger at the sail that was now at no great distance. I viewed the vessel through the glass, but saw nothing remarkable. She was a motherly tub of a ship, with big topsails and short topgallant masts, and a cask-like roll in the sway of her whole fabric as the silver blue undulations took her. “Well, what is there to see?” “Tunder of God?” cried he in Dutch. “Lok, Mr. Fielding, how her yards vhas braced.” And now, indeed, I beheld what Jack might fairly call a miraculous sight. The wind, as I have said, was off our starboard bow, and we were, therefore, braced up on what is termed the starboard tack; but the stranger that was coming along was also braced up on the starboard tack, showing that she, like ourselves, had the wind on her starboard bow. For what did our two postures signify? This--that the wind with us was directly west-southwest, while the wind with the stranger was directly east-northeast. Here, then, were two vessels within a couple of miles of each other, so heading that one would pass the other within a biscuit-toss; here, I say, were two vessels steering in exactly opposite directions, but each braced up on the same tack, and each with the wind off the same bow! “May der toyfell seize me if I like him!” exclaimed Bol, looking aloft at our canvas and then around the sea.