half yacht, half trader, and sometimes with guests, and sometimes without. He was a skimmer of the seas, taking comfort and pleasure, for which his freight list might pay in whole or in part. While I was at Naples he came over and anchored his bark directly in front of the hotel where I was stopping. But my story of Yankee vessels is not all told. On my way down the coast of the Mediterranean a fellow passenger on the steamer, an Englishman named James Buchanan, was constantly boasting of the superiority of English vessels over all others. Of course I defended my own, nor was it difficult, in those days at least, to find fault with the squat sails, short top gallant masts, clumsy blocks, poorly set up spars, and if at anchor with sails furled, the untidy bunts which often looked like bundles of rags on the yards of the Englishmen. As we came to an anchor one morning in the harbor of Genoa, I pointed out to Mr. Buchanan a very trig looking bark, anchored near by, which had a familiar look. “She’s a tidy craft,” said he, “and she’ll be English, of course.” I knew better, and calling a boatman, directed him to row to the vessel. As we rowed round her stern I was not very much surprised to read, “Truman of Kingston,” in hospitable letters. I had often seen the Truman, Capt. Doane, as well as her sister ship, the Cecilian, Capt. Dawes, belonging to Joseph Holmes, and I spent a pleasant hour with the captain in his cabin before going ashore for a day’s stroll before leaving for Naples in the evening. It was singular that the only three American vessels visited by me in nearly a year’s absence from home, should have hailed from Plymouth, Kingston and Boston, and that all should have been commanded by men whom I knew. Another American vessel not actually visited by me during my trip to Europe in 1846, but seen under interesting circumstances, emphasized the environment enveloping me associated with home. On the second of May in the above year, Capt. John Eldridge of Yarmouth, Mass., master of the New York and Liverpool packet ship Liverpool, on which I was a passenger, sighted a dismasted vessel. She lay ahead of us directly on our course, and in answer to our hail as we rounded her stern, we found her to be the bark Espindola of and for New York from Liverpool, with four hundred steerage passengers, and commanded by Capt. Barstow of Hanover, Mass., fourteen miles distant from my house. Capt. Barstow reported that while he was in his cabin at eight o’clock on the morning before, the ship under full sail with a light northerly wind, without warning, was struck by a whirlwind, and completely dismasted. She wanted spars and provisions. The subsequent scenes were full of interest.