She disappeared in a twinkling round a reach of the canal where we were anchored, and we, that is the gunroom-officers, all except the second lieutenant, who had the watch, and the master, now got into our own gig also, rowed by ourselves, and away we all went in a covey; the purser and doctor, and three of the middies forward, Thomas Cringle, gent., pulling the stroke oar, with old Moses Yerk as coxswain;--and as the Dragon-flies were all red, so we were all sea-green, boat, oars, trousers, shirts, and night-caps. The strain was between the _Devil's Darning Needle_ and our boat, the _Watersprite_, which was making capital play, for although we had not the _bottom_ of the _top_men, yet we had more blood, so to speak, and we had already beaten them, in their last gig, all to sticks. But the Dragon-fly was a new boat, and now in the water for the first time. * * *
We were both of us so intent on our own match, that we lost sight of the Spaniard altogether, and the captain and the first lieutenant were bobbing in the sternsheets of their respective gigs like a couple of _souple Tams_, as intent on the game as if all our lives had depended on it, when in an instant the long, black, dirty prow of the canoe was thrust in between us, the old Don singing out, "_Dexa mi lugar, paysanos, dexa mi lugar, mis hijos._"[12] We kept away right and left, to look at the miracle; and there lay the canoe, rumbling and splashing, with her crew walloping about, and grinning and yelling like incarnate fiends, and as naked as the day they were born, and the old Don himself, so staid and sedate, and drawley as he was a minute before, now all alive, shouting, "_Tira, diablitos, tira_,"[13] flourishing a small paddle, with which he steered, about his head like a wheel, and dancing and jumping about in his seat, as if his bottom had been a _haggis_ with quicksilver in it.
"Zounds," roared the skipper,--"why, topmen--why gentlemen, give way for the honour of the ship--Gentlemen, stretch out--Men, pull like devils; twenty pounds if you beat him."
It was now the evening, near night-fall. A splendid scene burst upon our view, on rounding a precipitous rock, from the crevices of which some magnificent trees shot up--their gnarled trunks and twisted branches overhanging the canal where we were pulling, and anticipating the fast falling darkness that was creeping over the fair face of nature; and there we floated, in the deep shadow of the cliff and trees--Dragon-flies and Water-sprites, motionless and silent, and the boats floating so lightly that they scarcely seemed to touch the water, the men resting on their oars, and all of us wrapped with the magnificence of the scenery around us, beneath us, and above us.