steed that knows his rider,” and, like many another steed which the men of the forecastle have mounted, knows that it can throw its rider at pleasure, and the riders know it too.  Now and then a sailor will utter some fierce imprecation upon wind or sea, but it is in the impotence of despair, and not in the conscious, boastful mastery which the land-songs attribute to him.  What, then, does the sailor sing?—­and does he sing at all?

Certainly the sailor sings.  Did you ever walk through Ann Street, Boston, or haunt the purlieus of the Fulton Market? and when there did you never espy a huckster’s board covered with little slips of printed paper of the size and shape of the bills-of-fare at the Commonwealth Hotel?  They are printed on much coarser paper, and are by no means as typographically exact as the aforesaid carte, or as this page of the “Atlantic Monthly,” but they are what the sailor sings.  I know they are there, for I once spent a long summer’s day in the former place, searching those files for a copy of the delightful ballad sung (or attempted to be sung) by Dick Fletcher in Scott’s “Pirate,”—­the ballad beginning

  “It was a ship, and a ship of fame,
  Launched off the stocks, bound for the main.”

I did not find my ballad, and to this day remain in ignorance of what fate befell the “hundred and fifty brisk young men” therein commemorated.  But I found what the sailor does sing.  It was a miscellaneous collection of sentimental songs, the worn-out rags of the stage and the parlor, or ditties of highwaymen, or ballad narratives of young women who ran away from a rich “parient” with “silvier and gold” to follow the sea.  The truth of the story was generally established by the expedient of putting the damsel’s name in the last verse,—­delicately suppressing all but the initial and final letters.  The only sea-songs that I remember were other ballads descriptive of piracies, of murders by cruel captains, and of mutinies, with a sprinkling of sea-fights dating from the last war with England.

The point of remark is, that all of these depend for their interest upon a human association.  Not one of them professes any concern with the sea or ships for their own sake.  The sea is a sad, solemn reality, the theatre upon which the seaman acts his life’s tragedy.  It has no more of enchantment to him than the “magic fairy palace” of the ballet has to a scene-shifter.

But other songs the sailor sings.  The Mediterranean sailor is popularly supposed to chant snatches of opera over his fishing-nets; but, after all, his is only a larger sort of lake, with water of a questionable saltness.  It can furnish dangerous enough storms upon occasion, and, far worse than storms, the terrible white-squall which lies ambushed under sunny skies, and leaps unawares upon the doomed vessel.  But the Mediterranean is not the deep sea, nor has it produced the best and boldest navigators.  Therefore, although we still seek the sources of our maritime law amid the rock-poised huts (once palaces) of Amalfi, we must go elsewhere for our true sea-songs.