"Oh, Salters, Salters, why wasn't you abed an' asleep?
"How could I tell ?" said poor Salters, as the schooner swung up.
She might have been the very Flying Dutchman, so foul, draggled, and unkempt was every rope and stick aboard.

Her old-style quarter-deck was some four or five feet high, and her rigging flew knotted and tangled like weed at a wharf-end.

She was running before the wind--yawing frightfully--her staysail let down to act as a sort of extra foresail,--"scandalised," they call it,--and her fore-boom guyed out over the side.

Her bowsprit cocked up like an old-fashioned frigate's; her jib-boom had been fished and spliced and nailed and clamped beyond further repair; and as she hove herself forward, and sat down on her broad tail, she looked for all the world like a blowzy, frousy, bad old woman sneering at a decent girl.
"That's Abishai," said Salters.

"Full o' gin an' Judique men, an' the judgments o' Providence layin' fer him an' never takin' good holt.