“Say, rather, that she takes us for an enemy, and is wary,” returned Griffith. “Brown Dick has played the English so many tricks himself, that he is tender of his faith.” “Why, they have shown him a yellow flag over a blue one, with a cornet, and that spells Ariel, in every signal-book we have; surely he can't suspect the English of knowing how to read Yankee.” “I have known Yankees read more difficult English,” said Griffith, smiling; “but, in truth, I suppose that Barnstable has been, like myself, keeping a dead reckoning of his time, and his men have profited by the occasion. She is lying to, I trust.” “Ay! like a cork in a mill-pond, and I dare say you are right. Give Barnstable plenty of sea-room, a heavy wind, and but little sail, and he will send his men below, put that fellow he calls long Tom at the tiller, and follow himself, and sleep as quietly as I ever could at church.” “Ah! yours is a somniferous orthodoxy, Captain Manual,” said the young sailor, laughing, while he slipped his arms into the sleeves of a morning round-about, covered with the gilded trappings of his profession; “sleep appears to come most naturally to all you idlers. But give me a passage, and I will go up, and call the schooner down to us in the turning of an hour-glass.” The indolent soldier raised himself from the leaning posture he had taken against the door of the stateroom, and Griffith proceeded through the dark wardroom, up the narrow stairs that led him to the principal battery of the ship, and thence, by another and broader flight of steps to the open deck. The gale still blew strong, but steadily; the blue water of the ocean was rising in mimic mountains, that were crowned with white foam, which the wind, at times, lifted from its kindred element, to propel in mist, through the air, from summit to summit. But the ship rode on these agitated billows with an easy and regular movement that denoted the skill with which her mechanical powers were directed. The day was bright and clear, and the lazy sun, who seemed unwilling to meet the toil of ascending to the meridian, was crossing the heavens with a southern inclination, that hardly allowed him to temper the moist air of the ocean with his genial heat. At the distance of a mile, directly in the wind's eye, the Ariel was seen obeying the signal which had caused the dialogue we have related. Her low black hull was barely discernible, at moments, when she rose to the crest of a larger wave than common; but the spot of canvas that she exposed to the wind was to be seen, seeming to touch the water on either hand, as the little vessel rolled amid the seas. At times she was entirely hid from view, when the faint lines of her raking masts would again be discovered, issuing, as it were, from the ocean, and continuing to ascend, until the hull itself would appear, thrusting its bows into the air, surrounded by foam, and apparently ready to take its flight into another element.