We continued to exchange our meaning in this fashion while I finished breakfast. Conversation between us was scarcely now the hard labor it formerly was. She had a number of words in my tongue and I some in hers; then, by being much together--or, as I would rather put it, having by this time held many conversations in our fashion of discoursing--we had got to distinguish shades of signification which had been wasted before in one another’s gaze and gestures. Her looks were eloquence itself. Even now was I able to collect her mind when she talked to me with her face only; when she would talk to me, I say, for five minutes at a time merely with the expression of her face, never opening her lips. Her eyes were charged with the language of light and passions. She could look grief, dismay, concern, horror, pity, all other emotions, indeed, with an incomparable skill, force, and beauty of mute delivery. I went on deck, and stepped to the side, as was my custom, to peer ahead. Bol, who stood near the skylight, called out: “A sail!” He pointed over the starboard bow, and looking that way, I spied the delicate white gleam of a ship’s canvas. It was what we should call a fine, hard day, the atmosphere strong and tonical, cold, but without harshness or rawness. The breeze was fresh off the larboard beam, and swept with a rushing noise betwixt our masts--the breath of the young giant whose dam was the snow-darkened Antarctic hurricane. The surge was a long, steady sweep of sea, tall and wide, of the deepest blue I had ever beheld. The brig, with her yards braced well forward, the bowlines triced out, and every cloth that would draw pulling white as milk in the white sunshine from stay and yard and gaff and boom, was sweeping through the water with the speed of smoke down the wind. Magnificently buoyant was the vessel’s motion. The yeast of her wake seethed to her counter as she courtesyed. Large birds were flying over the track of snow astern. “What is that craft going to prove, Bol?” said I, taking up the glass. “Dot vhas not long to findt out,” he answered. In those times our telescopes were not as yours are now. I leveled the long and heavy tube, but it resolved me no more of the ship ahead than this--that a ship she was. “Shall ve shift our hellum und edge avay?” said Bol. “I will let you know,” said I, walking aft. I waited a bit, looked at the sail again, and found we were picking her up as though she were at anchor. By this time, also, most of her fabric having lifted above the sea-line, I was able to tell that she was square-rigged, like ourselves, but that, unlike the _Black Watch_, she had short topgallant masts; whence, as you will suppose, I set her down at once as a trader. This and our overhauling her so rapidly--which means, suppose her an enemy, then she had no more chance of getting alongside of us than a land crab a scudding rabbit--determined me to hold on as we were.