The first manœuvre of the Water-Witch was an attempt to gain the wind of her pursuer. A short experiment appeared to satisfy those who governed the brigantine that the effort was vain, while the wind was so fresh and the water so rough. She wore, and crowded sail on the opposite tack, in order to try her speed with the cruiser; nor was it until the result sufficiently showed the danger of permitting the other to get any nigher, that she finally put her helm aweather, and ran off, like a sea-fowl resting on its wing, with the wind over her taffrail. The two vessels now presented the spectacle of a stern chase. The brigantine also opened the folds of all her sails, and there arose a pyramid of canvas, over the nearly imperceptible hull, that resembled a fantastic cloud driving above the sea, with a velocity that seemed to rival the passage of the vapor that floated in the upper air. As equal skill directed the movements of the two vessels, and the same breeze pressed upon their sails, it was long before there was any perceptible difference in their progress. Hour passed after hour, and were it not for the sheets of white foam that were dashed from the bows of the Coquette, and the manner in which she even outstripped the caps of the combing waves, her commander might have fancied his vessel ever in the same spot. While the ocean presented, on every side, the same monotonous and rolling picture, there lay the chase, seemingly neither a foot nearer, nor a foot farther, than when the trial of speed began. A dark line would rise on the crest of a wave, and then, sinking again, leave, nothing visible, but the yielding and waving cloud of canvas, that danced along the sea. “I had hoped for better things of the ship, Master Trysail!” said Ludlow, who had long been seated on a night-head, attentively watching the progress of the chase. “We are buried to the bob-stays; and yet, there yon fellow lies, nothing plainer than when he first showed his studding-sails!” “And there he will lie, Captain Ludlow, while the light lasts. I have chased the rover in the narrow seas, till the cliffs of England melted away like the cap of a wave; and we had raised the sand-banks of Holland high as the sprit-sail-yard, and yet what good came of it? The rogue played with us, as your sportsman trifles with the entangled trout; and when we thought we had him, he would shoot without the range of our guns, with as little exertion as a ship slides into the water, after the spur shoars are knocked from under her bows.” “Aye, but the Druid had a little of the rust of antiquity about her. The Coquette has never got a chase under her lee, that she did not speak.”