Gradually, however, I got more at ease, and was noticing the extreme beauty of his short curling auburn hair, now that his cap was thrown aside, with a dash of premature grey here and there, like hoarfrost in early autumn; and the noble ivory forehead, paler by contrast with the bronzing of his face, and smooth as monumental alabaster while his fierce spirit was in calm, but crisping in a moment if his passions were roused, like the ripple on the calm sea before the first of the breeze; when he rose abruptly and led the way from the cabin. When we came on deck--Adderfang, or Wilson, or Wallace, or whatever his name for the moment might be--whistled "loud as the scream of the curlew," and an armed boat immediately shoved out from under the mangroves that grew on the small point or headland near the cocoa-nut trees, and pulled towards us. "Come," thought I, "he seems determined not to trust too much to our forbearance either."--The boat approached--it was apparently a very fast one, pulled by four splendid fellows in neat white trowsers and blue shirts, and all with cloth caps handsomely embroidered.--They had their cutlasses buckled round their waists by black belts, and there were four marines in white jackets, two in the bow and two aft, sitting with their muskets upright between their knees.--The officer commanding the boat was a tall sallow young man, very Yankee in appearance, dressed in a blue uniform coat, and one epaulette, with uniform buttons of some kind or another, so that altogether I should have taken him for an officer in the United States navy, had I accidentally met him. He came alongside. "Mr Kerrick"--said Adderfang, who evidently, but from what motive I could not tell, was most desirous that we should be off from our anchorage as fast as possible--"send Whitaker and four of his crew from the Mosca"--this I guessed was the schooner, although I afterwards found that she was no other than the far-famed piratical Baltimore clipper, the Snowflake, the terror of those seas--"and see--it is to get all put to rights aloft there--the head of the mainmast is badly sprung, you can tell him, and he will know better than any of us what to bring." "Ay, ay, sir,"--said his subaltern, and without more ado the boat shoved off again, not for the point, however, but direct for the beach under Mr ***'s house, where the officer landed, and the crew, leaving a boat-keeper on the beach, began to skylark about; but evidently they had their instructions never to move so far away but that they should be able to reach their boat again, _before we could_, if we had tried it. From their lingo, those youths were all of them either Americans or Englishmen, probably a mixture of both.