To show the various sorts of outfit which the men composing a man-of-war’s crew may be furnished with on first coming on board, I shall describe a scene which took place on the Leander’s quarter-deck, off the Port of New York, in 1804.  We were rather short-handed in those days; and being in the presence of a blockaded enemy, and liable, at half-an-hour’s warning, to be in action, we could not afford to be very scrupulous as to the ways and means by which our numbers were completed, so that able-bodied men were secured to handle the gun-tackle falls.  It chanced one day that we fell in with a ship filled with emigrants; a description of vessel called, in the classical dictionary of the cockpit, an “Irish guinea man.”  Out of her we pressed twenty Irishmen, besides two strapping fellows from Yorkshire, and one canny Scot.

Each of this score of Pats was rigged merely in a great coat, and a pair of something which might be called an apology for inexpressibles; while the rest of their united wardrobe could have been stowed away in the crown of any one of their hats.  Their motives for emigrating to a country where mere health and strength of body are sure to gain an independent provision were obvious enough; and I must say, that to this hour I have not been able to forget the melancholy cry or howl with which the separation of these hardy settlers from their families was effected by the strong arm of power.  It was a case of necessity, it is true; but still it was a cruel case, and one for the exercise of which the officer who put it in force deserves almost as much pity as the poor wretches whose feelings and interests it became his bounden duty to disregard.

In most admired contrast to this bewildered drove of half-starved Paddies stood the two immense, broad-shouldered, high-fed Yorkshiremen, dressed in long-tailed coats, corduroy breeches, and yellow-topped boots, each accompanied by a chest of clothes not much less than a pianoforte, and a huge pile of spades, pick-axes, and other implements of husbandry.  They possessed money also, and letters of credit, and described themselves as being persons of some substance at home.  Why they emigrated they would not tell; but such were their prospects, that it was difficult to say whether they or the wild Irishers were the most to be commiserated for so untoward an interruption.  Be this as it may, it cost the clerk half-an-hour to write down a list of their multifarious goods and chattels, while a single scratch of the pen sufficed for that of all the Irishmen.

At last honest Saunders came under review.  He was a tall, raw-boned, grave-looking personage, much pitted with the smallpox, and wearing a good deal of that harassed and melancholy air, which, sooner or later, settles on the brow of an assistant to a village pedagogue.  He was startled, but not abashed, when drawn to the middle of the deck, and asked, in the presence of fifty persons, what clothes and other