Bertie: Or, Life in the Old Field. A Humorous Novel: Washington Irving

WE were not the only sufferers by the gale. We were fortunate for that matter, in comparison with others, that came straggling in like a covey of partridges, scattered by a sportsman and his well-trained pointer. We had escaped with so small an injury as the springing of the head of our foremast, while one vessel, that anchored near us, had been dismasted. They reminded me, as they flocked to the anchorage, of the frightened landbirds, which one sees flying to a ship's rigging, when blown off shore by a westerly gale. They seemed eager to be once more at rest; and the busy, useful, homely, Lilliputian canal-craft nestled to the wharves as if they did not feel safe, even there, from the fury of the still raging storm. One of these last lay near us. She was a schooner of--possibly forty-five tons. She was laden scuppers-to, with fish; and the muddy swells gave now and then, as they rose and fell, a glimpse of her name, achieved in no very clerkly characters on the much-battered and time-embrowned stern; reminding one of the mysterious hieroglyphics in the wasteful blazonry of the tea companies' importations. Most persons, however, would have decided that the characters were English--as, indeed, they were; to which assertion I hold myself ready to "qualify." She rode uneasily on the tossing waves, which were most literally casting up mire and dirt; and kept up a fussy, fidgety clatter of ropes, and creaking of booms, and rattle of blocks, and slamming of cabin-doors, as if she longed to hug the dilapidated, rat-haunted old wharf, and thus to feel that she was safe.