She was a little ship; to describe her exactly she was ship-rigged on the fore and main, while on her schooner mizzen mast she carried a cross jack and topsail yard. She lifted, ragged with weeds, to the heads of the seas, and washed along, heavily rolling and pitching, and blowing white water off her bows, whalelike. I shifted the helm to close her for the sake of the sight of a strange face, for the sound of a strange human voice. She was abreast of us some time before noon and there lay before us, foaming and plunging, as quaint a picture as the ocean at that time had to offer, liberally furnished as her breast was with picturesque structures. She was as broad as she was long, of a greasy rusty black, and when the sea knocked her over she threw up her round of bottom till you watched for the keel; and the long grass streamed away from her as she rolled like hair from the head of a plunging mermaid. Many faces surveyed us from over her rail. Her sails fitted her ill, and were dark with use. After every roll and plunge the water poured like a mountain torrent out of her head-boards and channels; but I had read her name as we approached--her name and the name of the town she hailed from. She was the _Virginia Creeper_ of Whitby. Whitby! I had never visited that town, but I knew it in fancy through the famous Cook’s association with the place almost as well as I knew in reality the little towns of Deal and Sandwich. It was just one of those magical English words to sweep the mind and the imaginations of the mind clean out of the countless leagues of the Pacific into the narrow miles of one’s own home waters, there to behold again with a dreamer’s gaze the milk-white coasts of the south, the chocolate coasts of the north, the red sail of the smack plunging to the North Sea, the brown sail of the barge creeping close inshore, the projection of black and tarry timber pier, with its cluster of bright-hued wherries, the length of sparkling white sand, the shingly incline, the careened boat, the figure of its owner worked upon it with a tar brush. We foamed along together broadside to broadside, within musket shot, and I hailed the whaler and was answered.