Dikes and Ditches

The Young America, with every rag of canvas set, including studding-sails alow and aloft, rolled and pitched gracefully on the long swells of the German Ocean. The wind was very light from the north-west, and there was hardly enough of it to give the ship steerage-way. A mile off, on her starboard bow, was the Josephine, beclouded in the quantity of sail she carried, but hardly leaving a wake in the blue waters behind her. The hummocks and the low land of the shores of Holland and Belgium were in sight; but, with the present breeze, there was but little hope of reaching the mouth of the Scheldt that night, though it was hardly twenty miles distant.