Now, at sea, and in the fellowship of sailors, all men appear as they are.  No school like a ship for studying human nature.  The contact of one man with another is too near and constant to favor deceit.  You wear your character as loosely as your flowing trowsers.  Vain all endeavors to assume qualities not yours; or to conceal those you possess.  Incognitos, however desirable, are out of the question.  And thus aboard of all ships in which I have sailed, I have invariably been known by a sort of thawing-room title.  Not,—­let me hurry to say,—­that I put hand in tar bucket with a squeamish air, or ascended the rigging with a Chesterfieldian mince.  No, no, I was never better than my vocation; and mine have been many.  I showed as brown a chest, and as hard a hand, as the tarriest tar of them all.  And never did shipmate of mine upbraid me with a genteel disinclination to duty, though it carried me to truck of main-mast, or jib-boom-end, in the most wolfish blast that ever howled.

Whence then, this annoying appellation? for annoying it most assuredly was.  It was because of something in me that could not be hidden; stealing out in an occasional polysyllable; an otherwise incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote, unguarded allusions to Belles-Lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous to mention.

But suffice it to say, that it had gone abroad among the Areturion’s crew, that at some indefinite period of my career, I had been a “nob.”  But Jarl seemed to go further.  He must have taken me for one of the House of Hanover in disguise; or, haply, for bonneted Charles Edward the Pretender, who, like the Wandering Jew, may yet be a vagrant.  At any rate, his loyalty was extreme.  Unsolicited, he was my laundress and tailor; a most expert one, too; and when at meal-times my turn came round to look out at the mast-head, or stand at the wheel, he catered for me among the “kids” in the forecastle with unwearied assiduity.  Many’s the good lump of “duff” for which I was indebted to my good Viking’s good care of me.  And like Sesostris I was served by a monarch.  Yet in some degree the obligation was mutual.  For be it known that, in sea-parlance, we were chummies.

Now this chummying among sailors is like the brotherhood subsisting between a brace of collegians (chums) rooming together.  It is a Fidus-Achates-ship, a league of offense and defense, a copartnership of chests and toilets, a bond of love and good feeling, and a mutual championship of the absent one.  True, my nautical reminiscenses remind me of sundry lazy, ne’er-do-well, unprofitable, and abominable chummies; chummies, who at meal times were last at the “kids,” when their unfortunate partners were high upon the spars; chummies, who affected awkwardness at the needle, and conscientious scruples about dabbling in the suds; so that chummy the simple was made to do all the work of the firm, while chummy the cunning played the sleeping partner in his hammock.  Out upon such chummies!