Of the other men before the mast in the Alert, I know nothing of
peculiar interest. When visiting, with a party of ladies and
gentlemen, one of our largest line-of-battle ships, we were escorted
about the decks by a midshipman, who was explaining various matters on
board, when one of the party came to me and told me that there was
an old sailor there with a whistle round his neck, who looked at me
and said of the officer, "he can't show him anything aboard a ship." I
found him out, and, looking into his sunburnt face, covered with hair,
and his little eyes drawn up into the smallest passages for
light,- like a man who had peered into hundreds of
northeasters,- there was old "Sails" of the Alert, clothed in all the
honors of boatswain's-mate. We stood aside, out of the cun of the
officers, and had a good talk over old times. I remember the
contempt with which he turned on his heel to conceal his face, when
the midshipman (who was a grown youth) could not tell the ladies the
length of a fathom, and said it depended on circumstances.
Notwithstanding his advice and consolation to "Chips," in the steerage
of the Alert, and his story of his runaway wife and the
flag-bottomed chairs, he confessed to me that he had tried marriage
again, and had a little tenement just outside the gate of the yard.
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