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"The eighteen-gun corvette Columbine lay at single anchor at Spithead, her dainty little form sitting with swan-like beauty upon the water, and her lofty spars tapering gracefully upward to the sky. A great number of shore boats surrounded her, - some crowded with the men's wives, come thus far to bid a last adieu to their husbands ; others filled with Jews, bumboat women, duns, and that miscellaneous portion of a seaport town that always swarm about a man-of-war about to go "foreign". At daylight on the following morning the Columbine was to sail for the far Pacific."