It was only a few days before this that the new vessel of Mr. Withrow's, built by him, as everybody supposed, for Maurice Blake, had been towed around from Essex, and I remember how Maurice stood on the dock that afternoon and looked her over. There was not a bolt or a plank or a seam in her whole hull, not a square inch inside or out, that he had not been over half a dozen times while she was on the stocks; but now he had to look her over again, and as he looked his eyes took on a shine. She had been designed by a man famous the world over, and was intended to beat anything that ever sailed past Eastern Point.