The Tavern of the Seas

And so, along with the rest of the coastwise ragtag, which was seeking
harbor and holding-ground, came the ancient schooner Polly. Fog-masked
by those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but,
more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and
her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian;
with her grotesqueness accentuated by the fog pall, she seemed unreal--a
picture from the past.

She had an out-thrust of snub bow and an upcock of square stern, and
sag of waist--all of which accurately revealed ripe antiquity, just as
a bell-crowned beaver and a swallow-tail coat with brass buttons would
identify an old man in the ruck of newer fashions. She had seams like
the wrinkles in the parchment skin of extreme old age. She carried a
wooden figurehead under her bowsprit, the face and bust of a woman on
whom an ancient woodcarver had bestowed his notion of a beatific smile;
the result was an idiotic simper. The glorious gilding had been worn
off, the wood was gray and cracked. The Polly's galley was entirely
hidden under a deckload of shingles and laths in bunches; the
after-house was broad and loomed high above the rail in contrast to the
mere cubbies which were provided for the other fore-and-afters in the
flotilla which came ratching in toward Saturday Cove.

The Polly, being old enough to be celebrated, had been the subject of
a long-coast lyric of seventeen verses, any one of which was capable of
producing most horrible profanity from Captain Epps Candage, her master,
whenever he heard the ditty echoing over the waves, sung by a satirist
aboard another craft.