“No!  Then, if you are not a foreigner, why do you hoist false colours?  What business has an English sailor with these d——­d machines in his ears?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said poor Marline.  “I put them in only this morning, when I rigged myself in my new togs to answer the signal on shore.”

“Then,” said Sir Samuel, softened by the contrite look of his old shipmate, and having got rid of the greater portion of his bile by the first explosion, “you will now proceed to unrig yourself of this top hamper as fast as you can; pitch them into the surf if you like; but never, as you respect the warrant in your pocket, let me see you in that disguise again.”

When the drum beats the well-known “Generale,” the ship’s company range themselves in a single line along both sides of the quarter-deck, the gangways, and all round the forecastle.  In a frigate, the whole crew may be thus spread out on the upper deck alone; but in line-of-battle ships the numbers are so great that similar ranges, each consisting of a division, are likewise formed on the opposite sides of the main-deck.  The marines, under arms, and in full uniform, fall in at the after-part of the quarter-deck; while the ship’s boys, under the master-at-arms, with his ratan in hand, muster on the forecastle.

In some ships the men are sized, as it is called, the tallest being placed at the after-end, and so on down to the most diminutive, who is fixed at the extremity.  But this arrangement, being more of a military than of a naval cast, is rarely adopted now-a-days.  It will seldom happen, indeed, that the biggest and burliest fellows in a ship’s company are the leading men.  They may chance, indeed, to be poulterers, cook’s mates, or fit only to make sweepers of; personages who after a three years’ station barely know the stem from the stern, and could no more steer the ship than they could take a lunar distance.  Officers, however, on first joining a ship, are very apt to be guilty of some injustice towards the people by judging of them too hastily from appearance alone.  We are insensibly so much prepossessed in favour of a fine, tall, good-looking sailor-lad, and prejudiced against a grizzled, crooked, little wretch, that if both happen to be brought before us for the same offence, we almost instinctively commit the injustice of condemning the ugly fellow, and acquitting the smart-looking one, before a tithe of the evidence has reached our ears.

Leaving these speculative questions, however, for the present, let us return to the divisions, which are arranged along the deck, not, as formerly, by sizes, but, in the proper way, by the watch-bill.  The forecastle-men, of course, come first, as they stand so in the lists by which they are mustered at night by the mate of the watch; then the foretop men, and so on to the gunners, after-guard, and waisters.  Each division is under charge of a lieutenant, who, as well as the midshipmen of his division, appears