smaller dramatists for the Wapping class of theatres, to be by them abandoned to the smallest writers of pirate and privateer tales for the Sunday press.  And stringing these together, with a hazy apprehension of their meaning, they think they are “talking sailor” in great perfection.  Now the sailor will talk with pleasure to any straightforward and perfectly “green” landsman, and the two will converse in an entirely intelligible manner.  But confusion worse confounded is the result of this ambitious ignorance,—­confusion of brain to the sailor, and confusion of face to the landsman.

For the sea has a language, beyond a peradventure,—­an exceedingly arbitrary, technical, and perplexing one, unless it be studied with the illustrated grammar of the full-rigged ship before one, with the added commentaries of the sea and the sky and the coast chart.  To learn to speak it requires about as long as to learn to converse passably in French, Italian, or Spanish; and unless it be spoken well, it is exceedingly absurd to any appreciative listener.

If you desire to study it philologically, after the living manner of Dean Trench, it will well repay you.  If you desire to use it as a familiar vehicle of discourse, wherewith to impress the understanding and heart of the sailor, you undertake a very difficult thing.  For though men are moved best by apt illustrations from the things familiar to them, unapt illustrations most surely disgust them.

But if you earnestly desire it, we know of but one certain course, which is best explained in a brief anecdote.  An English gentleman, who was in all the agonies of a rough and tedious passage from Folkestone to Boulogne, was especially irritated by the aggravating nonchalance of a fellow-passenger, who perpetrated all manner of bilious feats, in eating, drinking, and smoking, unharmed.  English reserve and the agony of sea-sickness long contended in Sir John’s breast.  At last the latter conquered, and, leaning from the window of his travelling-carriage, which was securely lashed to the forward deck of the steamer, he exclaimed,—­“I say, d’ye know, I’d give a guinea to know your secret for keeping well in this infernal Channel.”  The traveller solemnly extended one hand for the money, and, as it dropped into his palm, with the other shaded his mouth, that no portion of the oracle might fall on unpaid-for ears, and whispered,—­“Hark ye, brother, GO TO SEA TWENTY YEARS, AS I HAVE.”

THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME.

“And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”—­TWELFTH NIGHT.

My friend Jameson, the lawyer, has frequently whiled away an evening in relating incidents which occurred in his practice during his residence in a Western State.  On one occasion he gave a sketch of a criminal trial in which he was employed as counsel; the story, as developed in court and completed by one of the parties subsequently, made so indelible an impression on my mind that I am constrained to write down its leading features.  At the same time, I must say, that, if I had heard it without a voucher for its authenticity, I should have regarded it as the most improbable of fictions.  But the observing reader will remember that remarkable coincidences, and the signal triumph of the right, called poetical justice, are sometimes seen in actual life as well as in novels.