"Now _I_ should call that a brig." Thus Bradshaw, pursuing the great controversy. But Fenwick knows better, or thinks he does. She's a brigantine, and there are sprits'ls on both masts, and only one square sail on the foremast. He may be right, for anything we know. Anyhow, her sheets are white in the sun, as she tacks down channel against the west or south-west wind, which has freshened. And she is a glorious sight as she comes in quite close to the pier-head, and goes into stays--(is that right?)--and her great sails flap and swing, and a person to whom caution is unknown, and who cares for nothing in heaven or earth, sits unconcerned on a string underneath her bowsprit, and gets wet through every time she plunges, doing something nautical in connexion with her foresail overhead. And then she leans over in the breeze, and the white sheets catch it full--so near you can hear the boom click as it swings, and the rattle of the cordage as it runs through the blocks--and then she gets her way on her, and shoots off through a diamond-drench of broken seas, and we who can borrow the coastguard's telescope can know that she is the Mary of Penzance, but are none the wiser. And a man stripped to the waist, who is washing radishes on the poop, continues washing radishes unmoved, and ignores all things else. "As far as the young man himself goes, I believe there is nothing to be said. But the mother is quite unpresentable, perfectly impossible. And the eldest sister is married to a Dissenting clergyman--a very worthy man, no doubt, but not exactly. And the girls are loud, etc., etc., etc." Miss Arkwright's mamma ripples on, even as persons of condition ripple; and Tishy, whose views in this direction have undergone expansion, manages to forget how she has done the same herself--not long ago, neither!--and decides that the woman is detestable. Not so her daughter, who, with Sally as guardian and dolly as ward, is awaiting the arrival of the party at the galvanic battery. She is yearning for the great event; not for a promised land of jerks and spasms for herself, but for her putative offspring. She encourages the latter, telling her not to be pitened and kye. Dolly doesn't seem apprehensive--shows great self-command, in fact. But this detestable mother of a lovable daughter and an untempting granddaughter is destined to become still more detestable in the eyes of the Julius Bradshaws before she exhausts her topic. For as the party draws near to the scene of scientific recreation--and progress is slow, as she is deliberate as well as detestable; and, of course, is the pace-maker--she climbs up to a higher platform, as it were, for the contemplation of a lower deep. She assumes, for purposes of temporary handling of the subject, the air of one too far removed to know more about its details than the seismograph at Greenwich knows about the earthquake in the Andes. A dim contemplation of a thing afar--to be forgotten on the spot, after record made.