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 out stripped 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 portsman 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."

"Ay, 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."