The seamen paused. In another instant, the long-seen and mysterious ship was within a hundred feet of them. The very power of that wind, which was wont usually to raise the billows, now pressed the element, with the weight of mountains, into its bed. The sea was every where a sheet of froth, but no water swelled above the level of the surface. The instant a wave lifted itself from the security of the vast depths, the fluid was borne away before the tornado in driving, glittering spray. Along this frothy but comparatively motionless surface, then, the stranger came booming, with the steadiness and grandeur with which a dark cloud is seen to sail before the hurricane. No sign of life was any where discovered about her. If men looked out, from their secret places, upon the straitened and discomfited wreck of the Bristol trader, it was covertly, and as darkly as the tempest before which they drove. Wilder held his breath, for the moment the stranger drew nighest, in the very excess of suspense; but, as he saw no signal of recognition, no human form, nor any intention to arrest, if possible, the furious career of the other, a smile of exultation gleamed across his countenance, and his lips moved rapidly, as though he found pleasure in being abandoned to his distress. The stranger drove by, like a dark vision and, ere another minute, her form was beginning to grow less distinct, in a thickening body of the spray to leeward. “She is going out of sight in the mist!” exclaimed Wilder, when he drew his breath, after the fearful suspense of the few last moments. “Ay, in mist, or clouds,” responded Nighthead, who now kept obstinately at his elbow, watching with the most jealous distrust, the smallest movement of his unknown Commander. “In the heavens, or in the sea, I care not, provided she be gone.” “Most seamen would rejoice to see a strange sail, from the hull of a vessel shaved to the deck like this.” “Men often court their destruction, from ignorance of their own interests. Let him drive on, say I, and pray I! He goes four feet to our one; and now I ask no better favour than that this hurricane may blow until the sun shall rise.” Nighthead started, and cast an oblique glance which resembled denunciation, at his companion. To his blunted faculties, and superstitious mind, there was profanity in thus invoking the tempest, at a moment when the winds seemed already to be pouring out their utmost wrath. “This is a heavy squall, I will allow,” he said, “and such an one as many mariners pass whole lives without seeing; but he knows little of the sea who thinks there is not more wind where this comes from.” “Let it blow!” cried the other, striking his hands together a little wildly; “I pray only for wind!”