“The next mornin’ it was blowin’ fresh and lively, and the lookout sighted a schooner lyin’ to a couple of miles to the lew’ard, reefed daown close, and a flag flyin’, union down,—­signal of distress.  Thinkin’ they were sinkin’, the captain of the steamer put towards her, and rounded to half a mile off and called for volunteers to git aout the bot.  Half a dozen brave fellers sprang to the davits, and among ’em aour Boothbay boys.  They’d been in a fix, ye see, and was eager to help the rest of sufferin’ humanity.  She was rollin’ so that it tuck ’em nigh an hour to git the bot over, and then two men fell overboard; but finally they got off toward the schooner, all hands givin’ ’em three cheers.

“It was a hard pull, and a nasty sea, but they kept at it, and in half an hour was within hailin’-distance.  Then the third officer of the steamer stood up and sung aout, ‘Schooner ahoy!’ ‘Ay, ay!’ says a man in the schooner’s fore-riggin’, and the men see naow that she was ridin’ like a duck and as dry as a sojer.  ‘Are ye in distress?’ sung aout the officer.  ‘Yas,’ came from the man in the riggin’.  ‘Flounderin’?’ shouted the officer ag’in.  ‘No,’ sung out old man Muggridge, for it was him:  ’next thing to it.  We’re aout o’ beans.  Kin ye spare a pot?’

“Wall,” continued Captain Sol, reddening with the roar of laughter that accompanied the recollection, “it ain’t for me, bein’ a perfesser of religion, to let on what the men in the bot said, but it had a master-effect on the deacon, for afore them rescuers got back to the steamer he’d shook aout his reefs and was haulin’ to the east’ard.

“Wall,” said the old skipper, banking the fire with a shovelful of sand, as his visitors rose to go, “to-morrow, then, at early flood, sharp.”

The early flood was that dismal time when the phantom mists of night still cling to the earth, and low-lying clouds of fog cover the river, only to be dispersed by the coming day.  Cold and cheerless as it was, it found us again launching the whale-boat, and, when the sail was trimmed aft and pipes lighted, we rushed into the fog and headed down the river to meet the rising sun.

The mist was so dense that only the glimmer of Captain Sol’s pipe could be seen for’ard, appearing like an intermittent eye gleaming through the fog that settled upon our oil-skins in crystal drops and ran in tiny rivulets down the creases into the boat.  For a mile we scudded along before the west wind through the gloom, and then a wondrous change commenced.  Soft gleams of light shot from the horizon upward, the dark-blue heavens assumed a lighter tint, the pencilled rays growing broader and fusing together, producing a strange and rapidly-spreading nebulous light.  The cloud of low-lying mist now became a brassy hue, seemingly heated to ignition, and then from its very substance appeared to rise a fiery, glowing mass that flooded the river with a golden radiance.

“It’s a master-sight,” quoth Captain Sol between the puffs, as the change went on and the fog began to break before the rising sun.  “I ain’t no likin’ for fogs.  Ye see——­” But here the skipper stopped, as a peculiar sound and then another, the puffing of the white whale, was heard.