“What, that dirty looking brig, doctor, with her sides looking as rusty as if she had not had a coat of paint for the last year!”
“It’s the schooner disguised. It is easy enough, lad, to alter the rig, and to get hold of dirty sails and to dirty the paint, but you can’t alter the shape. No Greek, or Turk either, ever turned out the hull of that brig.”
“It is marvellously like the schooner,” Horace said. “I should almost have sworn that it was her.”
“It is the schooner, lad. How she got there, and what she is doing, I don’t know, but it is her.”
“What is it?” Ahmed asked. “What is there curious in that brig that you are so interested in her?”
“We both think it is our schooner, Ahmed; the one in which we took your father and mother from Athens in.”
“That!” Ahmed exclaimed incredulously; “why, my sisters were always saying what a beautiful vessel it was, with snow-white sails.”
“So she had, Ahmed; but if it is the schooner she is disguised altogether. They have taken down her top-masts and put those stumpy spars in instead; they have put up yards and turned her into a brig; they have got sails from somewhere and slackened all her ropes, and made her look dirty and untidy; still we both think that it is her. Please tell the boatmen to cross to the vessel and row alongside.”
Ahmed gave the order, and as the caique shot away from the shore said: “But how could it be your ship? Do you think that she has been captured? If not, she could not have ventured up here.”