The little rusty, pudgy steamboat lay at the down-stream side of the Foundry wharf. Her name was so long and her paddle-box so short, that the painter, beginning with ambitious large letters, had been compelled to abbreviate the last syllable. Her title read thus:-- I. AMBUSTER. Certainly a formidable inscription for a steamboat! When she hove in sight, Perry halted, resumed his stately demeanor, and em-barked as if he were a Doge entering a Bucentaur to wed a Sea. There was nobody on deck to witness the arrival and salute the _magnifico_. Perry looked in at the Cap'n's office. He beheld a three-legged stool, a hacked desk, an inky steel-pen, an inkless inkstand; but no Cap'n Ambuster. Perry inspected the Cap'n's state-room. There was a cracked looking-glass, into which he looked; a hair-brush suspended by the glass, which he used; a lair of blankets in a berth, which he had no present use for; and a smell of musty boots, which nobody with a nose could help smelling. Still no Captain Ambuster, nor any of his crew. Search in the unsavory kitchen revealed no cook, coiled up in a corner, suffering nightmares for the last greasy dinner he had brewed in his frying-pan. There were no deck hands bundled into their bunks. Perry rapped on the chain-box and inquired if anybody was within, and nobody answering, he had to ventriloquize a negative. The engine-room, too, was vacant, and quite as unsavory as the other dens on board. Perry patronized the engine by a pull or two at the valves, and continued his tour of inspection. The Ambuster's skiff, lying on her forward deck, seemed to entertain him vastly. "Jolly!" says Perry. And so it was a jolly boat in the literal, not the technical sense. "The three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl; and here's the identical craft," says Perry. He gave the chubby little machine a push with his foot. It rolled and wallowed about grotesquely. When it was still again, it looked so comic, lying contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that Perry had a roar of laughter, which, like other laughter to one's self, did not sound very merry, particularly as the north-wind was howling ominously, and the broken ice on its downward way was whispering and moaning and talking on in a most mysterious and inarticulate manner. "Those sheets of ice would crunch up this skiff, as pigs do a punkin," thinks Perry. And with this thought in his head he looked out on the river, and fancied the foolish little vessel cast loose and buffeting helplessly about in the ice. He had been so busy until now, in prying about the steamboat and making up his mind that Captain and men had all gone off for a comfortable supper on shore, that his eyes had not wandered toward the stream. Now his glance began to follow the course of the icy current. He wondered where all this supply of cakes came from, and how many of them would escape the stems of ferry-boats below and get safe to sea.