The craft, freighted with this uncouth apparition, was very peculiar in appearance. She had been a Spanish gun-boat--originally a twin-sister to one that Gazelle had, during the war, cut out from Rosas bay. She was about sixty feet long over all, and seventeen feet beam; her deck being as round as her bottom; in fact she was more like a long cask than any thing else, but with a most beautiful run notwithstanding, and without exception the roomiest vessel of her size that I ever saw. She had neither bulwarks, quarters, nor rail, nor in fact any ledge whatever round the gunnel, so that she had no use for scuppers. Her stern, peaked up like a New Zealand war-canoe, tapering away to a point, which was perforated to receive the rudder-head, while forward she had a sharp beak, shaped like the proa of a Roman galley; but she was as strong as wood and iron could make her--her bottom being a perfect bed of timbers, so that they might have been caulked--and tight as a bottle. What answered to a bowsprit was a short thumb of a stick about ten feet high, that rose at an angle of thirty degrees; and she had only one mast, a strong stump of a spar, about thirty feet high, stayed well forward, in place of raking aft; high above which rose the large lateen sail already mentioned, with its long elastic spliced and respliced yard tapering away up into the sky, until it seemed no thicker than the small end of a fishing-rod when bent by the weight of the line and bait. It was of immense length, and consisted of more than half a-dozen different pieces. Its heavy iron-shod heel was shackelled, by a chain a fathom long, to a strong iron-bar, or bolt, that extended athwart the forepart of the little vessel, close to the heel of the bowsprit, and to which it could be hooked and unhooked, as need were, when she tacked, and it became necessary to jib the sail. The outlandish-looking craft slowly approached, and we were now within hail. "I hope nothing is amiss with Mr Donovan?" sung out the commodore. "By the powers, but there is though!" promptly replied the curious figure with the trumpet and umbrella, in a strong clear voice.--A pause. All our glasses were by this time levelled at the vessel, and everyone more puzzled than another what to make of it. "Who are you, sir?" again asked the commodore. "Where is Mr Donovan?" Here Mr Binnacle, a midshipman on board, hailed us through his hand, but we could not hear him; on which the man in the hammock struck him, without any warning, across the pate with his trumpet. The midshipman and the rest of the crew, we could see, now drew close together forward, and, from their gestures, seemed to be preparing to make a rush upon the figure who had hailed. Sir Oliver repeated his question--"Who are you, sir?" "Who am I, did you say? That's a good one," was the answer. "Why, Sir Oliver," said I, "I believe _that_ is Mr Donovan himself. Poor fellow, he must have gone mad."