below, for I found the ship just weathering the south-west Spit, a position that enabled me to make a fair wind of it past the Hook and out to sea.

Certainly I was in no haste to quit home. I was leaving my native land, Clawbonny, the grave of my sister, and Lucy, dearest Lucy, all behind me; and, at such an instant, one feels the ties that are about to be separated. Still, every seaman is anxious for an offing, and glad was I to see the head of the Dawn pointing in the right direction, with her yards nearly square, and a fore-top-mast studding-sail set. The pilot was all activity, and Marble, cool, clear-headed in his duty, and instinctively acquainted with everything belonging to a vessel, was just the man to carry out his views to his heart's content.

The ship went, rising and falling on the swells of the ocean, that now began to make themselves felt, past the light and the low point of the Hook, within a few minutes after we had squared away, and, once more, the open ocean lay before us. I could not avoid smiling at Neb, just as we opened the broad waste of waters, and got an unbroken view of the rolling ocean to the southward. The fellow was on the main-top-sail yard, having just run out, and lashed the heel of a top-gallant-studding-sail boom, in order to set the sail. Before he lay in to the mast, he raised his Herculean frame, and took a look to windward. His eyes opened, his nostrils dilated, and I fancied he resembled a hound that scented game in the gale, as he snuffed the seaair which came fanning his glistening face, filled with the salts and peculiar flavours of the ocean. I question if Neb thought at all of Chloe, for the next hour or two!

As soon as we got over the bar, I gave the pilot my package, and he got into his boat. It was not necessary to shorten sail in order to do this, for the vessel's way did not exceed five knots.

"Do you see the sail, hereaway in the south-eastern board," said the pilot, as he went over the side, pointing towards a white speck on the ocean;" take care of that fellow, and give him as wide a berth as possible, or he may give you a look at Halifax, or Bermuda."

"Halifax, or Bermuda! I have nothing to do with either and shall not go there. Why should I fear that sail ?"

men.

"On account of your cargo, and on account of your That is His Majesty's ship Leander; she has been off here, now, more than a week. The inward-bound craft say she is acting under some new orders, and they name several vessels that have been seen heading north-east after she had boarded them. This new war is likely to lead to new troubles on the coast, and it is well for all outwardound ships to be on the look-out."

"His Majesty's ship" was a singular expression for an American to use, towards any sovereign, twenty years after the independence of the country was acknowledged. But, it was common then, nor has it ceased entirely even among the newspapers of the present hour; so much harder is it to substitute a new language than to produce a revolution. Notwithstanding this proof of bad taste in the pilot, I did not disregard his caution. There had been certain unpleasant rumours, up in town, for more than a month, that the two great belligerents would be apt to push each other into the old excesses, England and France at that day having such a monopoly of the ocean as to render them somewhat independent of most of the old-fashioned notions of the rights of neutrals. As for America, she was cursed with the cant of economy-an evil that is apt to produce as many bad consequences as the opposite vice, extravagance. The money paid as interest on the sums expended in the war of 1812, might have maintained a navy that would have caused both belligerents to respect her rights, and thereby saved the principal entirely, to say nothing of all the other immense losses dependent on an interrupted trade; but demagogues were at work with their raven throats, and it is not reasonable to expect that the masses can draw very just distinctions on the subject of remote interests, when present expenditure is the question immediately before them. It is true, I remember a modern French logician, who laid down the dogma that the tendency of democracies being to excesses, if you give a people the power, they would tax themselves to death; but, however true this theory may be in the main, it certainly is not true quoad the good citizens of the great model republic. It was bad enough to be accursed with a spurious economy; but this was not the heaviest grievance that then weighed upon the national interests.

The demon of faction, party spirit, was actively at work in the country; and it was almost as rare to find a citizen who was influenced purely by patriotic and just views, as it would be to find an honest man in the galleys. The nation, as a rule, was either English or French. Some swore by the First Consul, and some by Billy Pitt. As for the commercial towns, taken in connection with the upper classes, these were little more than so many reflections of English feeling, exaggerated and rendered still more factitious, by distance. Those who did not swallow all that the English tories chose to pour down their throats, took the pillules Napoleons without gagging. If there were exceptions, they were very few, and principally among travelled men-pilgrims who, by approaching the respective idols, had discovered they were made by human hands!

Impressment at sea, and out of neutral vessels, was re vived, as a matter of course, with the renewal of the war and all American ships felt the expediency of avoiding cruisers that might deprive them of their men. Strange as it may seem, a large and leading class of Americans justified this claim of the English, as it was practised on board their own country's vessels! What will not men defend when blinded and excited by faction? As this practice was to put the mariner on the defensive, and to assume that every man was an Englishman who could not prove, out on the ocean, a thousand miles from land perhaps, that he was an American, it followed that English navy officers exercised a jurisdiction over foreigners and under a foreign flag, that would not be tolerated in the Lord High Chancellor himself, in one of the streets of London; that of throwing the burthen of proving himself innocent, on the accused party! There was an abundance of other principles that were just as obvious, and just as unanswerable as this, which were violated by the daily practices of impressment, but they all produced no effect on the members of Congress and public writers that sustained the right of the English, who as blindly espoused one side of the main question as their opponents espoused the other. Men acting under the guidance of factions are not compos mentis.

I think I may say, without boasting unreasonably of my own good sense, that I have kept myself altogether aloof

from the vortex of parties, from boyhood to the present hour. My father had been a federalist, but a federalist a good deal cooled off, from having seen foreign countries, and no attempts had ever been made to make me believe that black was white in the interest of either faction. I knew that impressment from foreign vessels, out of the waters of Great Britain at least, could be defended on no other ground but that of power; and as for colonial produce, and all the subtleties that were dependent on its transportation, I fancied that a neutral had a perfect right to purchase of one belligerent and sell to another, provided he found it his interest so to do, and he violated no positive-not paper— blockade, or did not convey articles that are called contraband of war.

With these views, then, it is not surprising that I easily I came into the pilot's opinion, and determined to give the Leander a sufficient berth, as sailors express it.

The Leander was a fifty, on two decks, a very silly sort of a craft; though she had manfully played her part at the Nile, and on one or two other rather celebrated occasions, and was a good vessel of the build. Still, I felt certain the Dawn could get away from her, under tolerably favourable circumstances. The Leander afterwards became notorious, on the American coast, in consequence of a man killed in a coaster by one of her shot, within twenty miles of the spot where I now saw her; an event that had its share in awakening the feeling that produced the war of 1812; a war of which the effects are just beginning to be made manifest in the policy of the republic: a fact, by-the-way, that is little understood, at home or abroad. The Leander was a fast ship of her kind, but the Dawn was a fast ship of any kind; and I had great faith in her. It is true, the fifty had he advantage of the wind; but she was a long way off, well to the southward, and might have something in sight that could not be seen even from our top-gallant yards, whither Neb was sent to take a look at the horizon.

Our plan was soon laid. The south side of Long Island trending a little to the north of east, I crdered the ship to be steered east by south, which, with the wind at southsouth-west, gave me an opportunity to carry all our stud-. ling-sails. The soundings were as regular as the ascent

on the roof of a shed, or on that of a graded lawn; and the land in sight less than two leagues distant. In this manner we ran down the coast, with about six knots' way on the ship, as soon as we got from under the Jersey shore.

In less than an hour, or when we were about four leagues from Sandy Hook Light, the Englishman wore short round, and made sail to cut us off. By this time, he was just forward of our weather beam, a position that did not enable him to carry studding-sails on both sides; for, had he kept off enough for this, he would have fallen into our wake; while, by edging away to close with us, his after-sails becalmed the forward, and this at the moment when every thing of ours pulled like a team of well-broken cart-horses. Notwithstanding all this, we had a nervous afternoon's and night's work of it. These old fifties are great travellers off the wind; and more than once I fancied the Leander was going to lay across my bows, as she did athwart those of the Frenchman, at the Nile. The Dawn, however, was not idle, and, as the wind stood all that day, throughout the night, and was fresher, though more to the southward, than it had hitherto been, next morning, I had the satisfaction of seeing Montauk a little on my lee-bow, at sun-rise, while my pursuer was still out of gun-shot on my weather beam.

Marble and I now held a consultation on the subject of the best mode of proceeding. I was half disposed to let the Leander come up, and send a boat on board us. What had we to fear? We were bound to Hamburg, with a cargo, one half of which came from the English, while the other half came from French islands.-But what of that? Marble, however, would not listen to such a project. He affirmed that he was a good pilot in all the sounds, and that it would be better to risk everything, rather than let that fifty close with us.

"Keep the ship away, for Montauk, sir," exclaimed the mate "keep her away for Montauk, and let that chap follow us if he dare! There's a reef or two, inside, that I'll engage to lead him on, should he choose to try the game, and that will cure him of his taste for chasing a Yankee."

"Will you engage, Moses, to carry the ship over the shoals, if I will do as you desire, and go inside?"

"I'll carry her into any port, east of Block Island, Cap