“Highland day and off she goes,
  Off she goes with a flying fore-topsail,
  Highland day and off she goes.”

It is one of the most spirited things imaginable, when well sung, and, when applied to the topsail-halyards, brings the yards up in grand style.

These are some of the working-songs of the sea.  They are not chosen for their sense, but for their sound.  They must contain good mouth-filling words, with the vowels in the right place, and the rhythmic ictus at proper distances for chest and hand to keep true time.  And this is why the seaman beats the wind in a trial of strength.  The wind may whistle, but it cannot sing.  The sailor does not whistle, on shipboard at least, but does sing.

Besides the working-day songs, there are others for the forecastle and dog-watches, which have been already described.  But they are seldom of the parlor pattern.  I remember one lovely moonlight evening, off the Irish coast, when our ship was slipping along before a light westerly air,—­just enough of it for everything to draw, and the ship as steady as Ailsa Crag, so that everybody got on deck, even the chronically sea-sick passengers of the steerage.  There was a boy on board, a steerage passenger, who had been back and forth several times on this Liverpool line of packets.  He was set to singing, and his sweet, clear voice rang out with song after song,—­ almost all of them sad ones.  At last one of the crew called on him for a song which he made some demur at singing.  I remember the refrain well (for he did sing it at last); it ran thus:—­

“My crew are tried, my bark’s my pride,
I’m the Pirate of the Isles.”

It was no rose-water piracy that the boy sang of; it was the genuine pirate of the Isle of Pines,—­the gentleman who before the days of California and steamers was the terror of the Spanish Main.  He was depicted as falling in deadly combat with a naval cruiser, after many desperate deeds.  What was most striking to us of the cabin was, that the sympathy of the song, and evidently of the hearers, was all on the side of the defier of law and order.  There was no nonsense in it about “islands on the face of the deep where the winds never blow and the skies never weep,” which to the parlor pirate are the indications of a capital station for wood and water, and for spending his honeymoon.  It was downright cutting of throats and scuttling of ships that our youngster sang of, and the grim faces looked and listened approvingly, as you might fancy Ulysses’s veterans hearkening to a tale of Troy.

There is another class of songs, half of the sea, half of the shore, which the fishermen and coasters croon in their lonely watches.  Such is the rhyme of “Uncle Peleg,” or “Pillick,” as it is pronounced,—­probably an historical ballad concerning some departed worthy of the Folger family of Nantucket.  It begins—­

  “Old Uncle Pillick he built him a boat
    On the ba-a-ck side of Nantucket P’int;
  He rolled up his trowsers and set her afloat
  From the ba-a-ck side of Nantucket P’int.”