She smiled, and slightly coloured. Indeed, at a little distance, with the rail to hide her dress, she would very well have passed for a young man, habited as she was in Captain Braine’s long pilot coat and his wide-awake, which entirely hid her hair to the level of her ears, and which she kept seated on her head by means of a piece of black tape passed under her chin. But shall I tell you that her beauty borrowed a new and fascinating freshness of grace from the very oddity of her attire? For my part, I found her more admirable in the perfections of her face and form, grotesquely clothed as she was, than had she come to my side but now from the hands of the most fashionable dressmaker and the most modish of hairdressers and milliners. The name of the old whaler lifted clear in long white letters to the heave of her square stern off the spread of froth that raced from under her counter: _Maria Jane Taylor_ was her title, and I remember it now as I can remember very much smaller matters which entered into that abominable time. The green and weedy and rust-stained fabric, heeling to the pressure of the wind, and making prodigious weather of the Pacific surge as she crushed into the violet hollow with a commotion of foam such as no whale which ever her boats had made fast to could have raised in its death-agony, swarmed and staggered along with frequent wild slantings of her spars, upon which her ill-patched sails pulled in disorderly spaces. A whole mob of people, black, orange-coloured, and white, stared at us from under all kinds of singular headgear over her weather rail, and a man swinging off in the mizzen shrouds, apparently waited for us to come abreast to hail us. As our clipper keel swept in thunder to her quarter, scarcely more water than a pistol-shot could measure dividing us, Lush came up from to leeward and stood beside me, but without speaking, simply holding himself in readiness—as I might witness in the sulky determined expression in the villain’s face—to silence me if I should attempt to hail. I glanced at him askant, running my eye down his round-backed muscular figure, and then put on a behaviour of perfect insensibility to his presence. ‘How touching is the sight of a strange face,’ said I to Miss Temple, ‘encountered in the heart of such a waste as this! Rough as those fellows are, how could one take them by the hand! with what pleasure could one listen to their voices! Would to God we were aboard of her!’ And I brought my foot with a stamp of momentary poignant impatience to the deck.