But I was too impatient to wait on my captain and see my ship—­so I bounced down the stairs, and in the twinkling of an eye, was on my way to Stonehouse, where my vanity received another tribute, by a raw recruit of marine raising his hand to his head, as he passed by me.  I took it as it was meant, raised my hat off my head, and shuffled by with much self-importance.  One consideration, I own, mortified me—­this was that the natives did not appear to admire me half so much as I admired myself.  It never occurred to me then, that middies were as plentiful at Plymouth Dock, as black boys at Port Royal, though, perhaps, not of so much value to their masters.  I will not shock the delicacy of my fair readers by repeating all the vulgar alliterations with which my noviciate was greeted, as I passed in review before the ladies of North Corner, who met me in Fore Street.  Unsophisticated as I then was, in many points, and certainly in this, I thought them extremely ill-bred.  Fortunately for me, the prayers of a certain description of people never prevail, otherwise I should have been immediately consigned to a place, from which, I fear, all the masses of France and Italy would not have extricated me.

I escaped from these syrens without being bound to the mast, like Ulysses; but, like him, I had nearly fallen a victim to a modern Polyphemus; for though he had not one eye in the middle of his forehead, after the manner of his prototype, yet the rays from both his eyes meeting together at the tip of his long nose, gave him very much that appearance.  Ignorance, sheer ignorance, in this, as in many other cases, was the cause of my disaster.  A party of officers, in full uniform, were coming from a court-martial.  “Oh ho!” said I, “here come some of us.”  I seized my dirk in my left hand, as I saw they held their swords, and I stuck my right hand into my bosom as some of them had done.  I tried to imitate their erect and officer-like bearing; I put my cocked-hat on fore and aft, with the gold rosette dangling between my two eyes, so that in looking at it, which I could not help doing, I must have squinted.  And I held my nose high in the air, like a pig in a hurricane, fancying myself as much an object of admiration to them as I was to myself.  We passed on opposite tacks, and our respective velocities had separated us to the distance of twenty or thirty yards, when one of them called out to me in a voice evidently cracked in His Majesty’s service—­“Hollo, young gentleman, come back here.”

I concluded I was going to be complimented on the cut of my coat, to be asked the address of my tailor, and to hear the rakish sit of my hat admired.  I now began to think I should hear a contention between the lords of the ocean, as to who should have me as a sample middy on their quarter-decks; and I was even framing an excuse to my father’s friend for not joining his ship.  Judge then of my surprise and mortification, when I was thus accosted in an angry and menacing tone by the oldest of the officers—­