The Yankee Champion — page 23: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

16 THE YANKEE CHAMPION. It was near the close of the day. The small pud- dles in the streets of Newburyport were crusted over with ice, and the air was chilly and piercing. Upon © one of the wharves at the northeastern extremity of the town stood three young men, all of them power- ful looking fellows, who were habited in seamen’s garbs, with rough pea-jackets buttoned close up to their chins. They were gazing intently toward the _ point where the passage between Plum Island and the main land opens to the Atlantic, and there, in full sight, with all her sails set, was a brig standing in, with the red flag of England at her peak. ‘“She’s a beauty, Nixon,’ said the elder of the three men. “She is, truly,’’ returned the man thus addressed, who was none other than Walter Nixon, a person already in the reader’s acquaintance. “She is a handsome craft, Baker, and with a little alteration would make a fast sailer, and a craft easily han- dled.”’ “T know not that she needs altering. She must be a good sailer as she is.’ “She is doubtless a ae saliler,’’ returned Nixon, as he watched the handsome brig; “‘but there are more in Boston harbor as good as she is. We must have a vessel that the British cannot beat. Don’t you see? Her rigging has the old English stiffness to it. Her masts put mein mind of an old school- mistress that once superintended my youthful ideas. All day long she used to sit bolt upright in her seat like a gun-deck stanchion, as though to bend a point would have sprung her back. I would have those masts rake more by eight degrees, at least. And then look at her bowsprit; it looks as though they Eomicbooks