By an observation we now found we were off the Tenasserim coast. The ship’s head was consequently put to the northward, and on we sailed towards our destination. At length, on a fine blowing day in the S. W. monsoon, the good ship the _Rottenbeam Castle_, after a five months’ voyage, entered on the turbid waters of the Sand Heads, renowned for sharks, shipwrecks, and the intricacy of its navigation, dashing on in good style, despite of the battering of the late gale, under all the sail she could carry on the foremast, and two spars rigged out as substitutes for those we had lost. All eyes were, at this time, anxiously on the look-out for the pilot. At length a sail was visible on the horizon, and ere long, a rakish little brig, with the Company’s Yankee-looking pilot-colours flying from the peak, came bowling down, and was pronounced _nem. con._ to be (strange misnomer) the pilot schooner. Not a moment elapsed ere a boat, manned by lascars, put off from her, and in a few minutes more, the rattle of oars and the boatswain’s whistle announced its arrival alongside. The pilot, accompanied by a bronzed stripling of fifteen, in a seaman’s round jacket and large straw hat, and whose business was to cast the lead, now mounted the side, and as he stepped on deck, touched his hat in a consequential sort of manner, which plainly indicated that pilots were no small men, in these latitudes. Mr. Merryweather, for so I believe he was called, was one of a numerous class, variously subdivided, called the pilot-service, whose extreme utility none can question who studies a chart of the Sand Heads, and the embouchure of the Ganges. The seniors, or branch-pilots, are, some of them, excellent old fellows, have their vessels in high order, give capital _feeds_ out of silver plate, and have generally some valetudinarian from Calcutta on board, invigorating the springs of existence by copious indraughts of the sea-breeze. Mr. Merryweather had quite the cut of an original, and I cannot, therefore, resist the inclination I feel to present the reader with a sketch of him. He was a sturdy, square-built man, of about forty, of whose jolly countenance it might be truly said, and in the language of the Latin grammar, “_qui color albus erat, nunc est contrarius albo_.” It presented, at one view, one of the most singular compounds of brown, brickdust, and purple I ever beheld; clearly indicating that it had long been the scene of a fierce struggle for the ascendency between the skyey influences of the Sand Heads, on the one hand, from without, and those of aqua vitæ, from within. Sun and wind, on the whole seemed to have had the best of it; but the forces of aqua vitæ had made a most determined stand on that elevated position, the nose, from which there appeared little chance of their being dislodged. Our sturdy Palinurus was attired in a camlet coat, with the uniform lion button, the colour whereof, once