But to all these symptoms of disaffection Wilder remained, as before, utterly indifferent.  If he heard them at all, he either disdained to yield them any notice, or, guided by a temporizing policy, he chose to appear unconscious of their import.  In the mean time, the vessel, like a bird whose wing had wearied with struggling against the tempest, and which inclines from the gale to dart along an easier course, glided swiftly away, quartering the crests of the waves, or sinking gracefully into their troughs, as she yielded to the force of a wind that was now made to be favourable.  The sea rolled on, in a direction that was no longer adverse to her course; and, as she receded from the breeze, the quantity of sail she had spread was no longer found trying to her powers of endurance.  Still she had, in the opinion of all her crew, quite enough canvas exposed to a night of such a portentous aspect.  But not so, in the judgment of the stranger who was charged with the guidance of her destinies.  In a voice that still admonished his inferiors of the danger of disobedience he commanded several broad sheets of studding-sails to be set, in quick succession.  Urged by these new impulses, the ship went careering over the waves; leaving a train of foam, in her track, that rivalled, in its volume and brightness, the tumbling summit of the largest swell.

When sail after sail had been set, until even Wilder was obliged to confess to himself that the “Royal Caroline,” staunch as she was, would bear no more, our adventurer began to pace the deck again, and to cast his eyes about him, in order to watch the fruits of his new experiment.  The change in the course of the Bristol trader had made a corresponding change in the apparent direction of the stranger who yet floated in the horizon like a diminutive and misty shadow.  Still the unerring compass told the watchful mariner, that she continued to maintain the same relative position as when first seen.  No effort, on the part of Wilder, could apparently alter her bearing an inch.  Another hour soon passed away, during which, as the log told him, the “Caroline” had rolled through more than three leagues of water, and still there lay the stranger in the west, as though it were merely a lessened shadow of herself, cast by the “Caroline” upon the distant and dusky clouds.  An alteration in his course exposed a broader surface of his canvas to the eyes of the spectators, but in nothing else was there any visible change.  If his sails had been materially increased, the distance and the obscurity prevented even the understanding Earing from detecting it.  Perhaps the excited mind of the worthy mate was too much disposed to believe in the miraculous powers possessed by his unaccountable neighbour, to admit of the full exercise of his experienced faculties on the occasion; but even Wilder, who vexed his sight, in often-repeated examinations, was obliged to confess to himself, that the stranger seemed to glide, across the waste of waters, more like a body floating in the air, than a ship resorting to the ordinary expedients of mariners.