The room in which they were breakfasting was imposingly furnished. The pictures were many and fine. One in particular took the eye, and detained it. It was hung over the sideboard, which glittered with plate; it represented a schooner, bowed by a sudden blast, coming at you. The white brine, shredded by the shrieking stroke of the squall, hissed shrilly from the cut-water. The life and spirit of the reality was in that fine canvas. The sailors seemed to run as you watched, the gaffs to droop with the handling of their gear. She came rushing in a smother of spume right at you, and, before delight could arise, you had felt a pleasurable shock of surprise that was almost alarm. Such is the effect produced by Cooper's bull as, with bowed head and eyes of fire, and horns of death, it looks to be bounding with the velocity of a locomotive out of the frame. Mr. Vanderholt and his daughter conversed for some time on matters of no concern to us who are to follow their fortunes. Presently, after helping himself to his second bloater--for his wealth had neither lessened his appetite nor influenced his choice of dishes: he clung, with true Dutch courage, to solid sausage; he loved new bread, smoking hot; he was wedded to all the several kinds of cured fish, and often drank a pint of beer, instead of coffee or tea, at his morning meal--he took his second herring, and, whilst his gray beard wagged to the movement of his jaws, an expression of pensiveness entered his face as he fastened his gaze upon the picture of the rushing schooner. 'How beautifully she is painted!' said he. 'It is the greatest of the arts. How with the pen could you make that vessel show as the brush has?' 'It could only be done by suggestion,' said Miss Vanderholt, looking up sideways at the picture. 'It is the hint that submits the pen-and-ink sketch.' 'So that, if a man has never seen a schooner, you might hint and suggest all your life, and the death-bed of that man would still find his mind a blank as to a schooner?' 'True,' said his daughter. 'I am going to tell you what I have made up my mind to do.' 'Yes, and there she is,' interrupted the girl, with a sweep of her hand at the picture. 'And pretty wet they are; and a fine handsome sea is going to run presently, till the yacht shall swoop into the cataracts like a wreck--veiled--strained! She is too small.' 'You consider one hundred and eighty tons too small? What would Columbus have thought of you? Do you know that Mynheer Vanderdecken is battling with the storms of the Cape of Good Hope at this very hour in something under one hundred and eighty tons?' 'But I really don't think, father, that you need such an extensive change.' 'My doctors are of my opinion. I require nothing less than three months of the sea-breeze, and all the climates that I can pack into that time.'