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Then, oh woeful fall! she was sold to the Norwegians, those thrifty mariners who are ever on the look-out for bargains in the way of ships who have seen their best days, and manage to succeed, in ways undreamed of by more lavish nations, in making fortunes out of such poor old battered phantoms of bygone prosperity. Tenacious as the seaman’s memory is for the appearance of any ship in which he has once sailed, it would have been no easy task for any of her former shipmates to recognise the splendid old Lion under her Scandinavian name of the Ganger Rolf, metamorphosed as she was too by the shortening of her tapering spars, the stripping of the yards from the mizen-mast, and the rigging up of what British sailors call the “Norwegian house-flag,” a windmill pump between the main and mizen masts. Thus transformed she began her degraded existence under new masters, crawling to and fro across the Atlantic to Quebec in summer, Pensacola or Doboy in winter, uneasily and spiritless as some gallant hunter dragging a timber waggon in his old age. Unpainted, weather-bleached, and with sails so patched and clouted that they looked like slum washing hung out to dry, she became, like the rest of the “wood-scows,” a thing for the elements to scoff at, and, seen creeping eastward with a deck-load of deals piled six feet high fore and aft above her top-gallant rail, was as pathetic as a pauper funeral. Eight seamen now were all that the thrift of her owners allowed to navigate her, who with the captain, two mates, carpenter, and cook, made up the whole of her crew, exactly the number of the officers she used to carry in her palmy days.