"We may have a chance to try her out on this run, who knows?" said the skipper. We were coming up on the porgy steamer then and you should have seen his eyes when they looked from the rail to the deck of his vessel and from the deck again to aloft. On the steamer the gang were in the waist watching us coming and they must have been piling the coal into her below and giving her the jet steadily, for out of her funnel was coming the smoke in clouds mixed with steam. "But their firemen can stoke till they're black in the face and they won't get more than eleven or eleven and a half knots out of her," said Clancy. "I know her--the Nautilus--and if this one under us ain't logging her fourteen good then I don't know. And she'll be doing better yet before we see New York." They were driving the porgyman then, but she was fated. Once we began to get her she came back to us fast enough, and once she was astern she troubled us no more. After the porgyman we passed a big white yacht, evidently just up from the West Indies after a winter's cruise. She looked a model for a good sailer, but there was no chance to try her out, for they had her under shortened sail when we went by. There was a New York blue-fisherman on our weather bow bound for New York, too, and the way we went by her was a scandal. And farther on we drove by a big bark--big enough, almost, to take us aboard. They were plainly trying to make a passage on her, but we left her too. Then we passed another yacht, but she wasn't carrying half our sail. Her hull was as long as ours, but she didn't begin to be sparred as we were. We must have had ten feet on her main-boom and ten feet more bowsprit outboard, and yet under her four lower sails she seemed to be making heavy going of it. It's a good yacht that can hold a fisherman in a breeze and a sea-way. We beat this one about as bad as we beat the blue-fisherman. As we went by we tried to look as though we had beaten so many vessels that we'd lost all interest in racing, and at the same time we were all dancing on our toes to think what a vessel we had under us. It was that passage we held the north-bound Savannah steamer for seven hours. Her passengers stood by the rail and watched us, and when at last we crowded our bowsprit past her nose, they waved their handkerchiefs and cheered us like mad. "When we get this one loosened up a bit and down to her trim, she'll sail some or I don't know," said our skipper. He stood in the cabin gangway then and filled his boots with water, but he wouldn't take in sail. Back behind us was another seiner. We could just make out that they were soaking it to her too. The skipper nodded his head back at her. Then, with one hand on the house and the other on the rail, he looked out from under our main-boom and across at the steamer. "Not a rag--let the spars come out of her."