Our own crew staring at the whaler over the quarter-deck bulwarks were incessantly bringing their eyes away from her to fix them upon me with a manner of angry suspicion that it was impossible to mistake. The noise of the roaring of the wind in her canvas was loud in the pouring air; the blue waters foamed viciously to her tall catheads, and her green and rusty bends showed raggedly amid the frothing, foaming, and seething curves of the boiling smother rushing past her; here and there aft was the muddy glint of a disc of begrimed window amid the line of her seams, out of which all the caulking appeared to have dropped. We were passing her as a roll of smoke might. ‘Barque ahoy!’ bawled the long slabsided man in the mizzen rigging in the nasal accents of the ‘longshore Yankee. Lush at my side stood grimly staring. Several of the crew on the quarter-deck were now watching me continuously. ‘What barque air you?’ came in a hurricane note out of the whaler’s mizzen shrouds. There was no reply from us. ‘Barque ahoy, I say!’ yelled the man with a frantic gesture of astonishment; ‘where air you bound, and what ship might you be?’ The _Lady Blanche_ rushed on; nevertheless, we were yet so close to the whaler even when we had her on our quarter that I could easily distinguish the features of the man who had hailed us as he hung motionless, as though withered by some blast from the skies, in the mizzen rigging, with his mouth wide open, whilst an expression of inimitable amazement was visible in the rows of faces along the bulwark rail, white and coloured alternately, like the keys of a pianoforte. On a sudden the man sprang out of the mizzen shrouds on to the deck; his legs were immensely long, and he was habited in a short monkey jacket. He started to run for the forecastle, and his prodigious strides made one think of a pair of tongs put into motion by some electrical power. He gained the forecastle head, where for one moment he stood surveying us, then bringing his hands to his face, he made what is known to schoolboys as a ‘long-nose’ at us, turning a little sideways, that we might clearly observe the humiliating derisiveness of his posture. In this attitude he remained whilst a man might have counted twenty, then turning his back upon us, he smote himself with a gesture of utmost scorn upon a part of his body which the short skirts of his monkey jacket left partially exposed; after which, with the air of a person whose mind has been relieved, he leisurely made his way aft, thrice, as he walked, turning his profile, that we might observe him lift his thumb and fingers again to his nose. A little while later the old whaler was plunging amid the white throbbings of her own churning a long mile astern; and in half an hour she looked to be scarcely more than a gleam out in the cold blue air, where there seemed a dimness in the atmosphere as of the blowing of crystals off the melting heads of the high seas.