blue anchor with a red rope to it; and in the matter of profanity he was sublime.  When he was getting out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear.  He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world feel it, too.  When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering after it.  I could not help contrasting the way in which the average landsman would give an order, with the mate’s way of doing it.  If the landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say:  ’James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;’ but put the mate in his place and he would roar out:  ’Here, now, start that gang-plank for’ard!  Lively, now!  WHAT’re you about!  Snatch it!  Snatch it!  There! there!  Aft again! aft again! don’t you hear me.  Dash it to dash! are you going to sleep over it!  ’Vast heaving.  ’Vast heaving, I tell you!  Going to heave it clear astern?  WHERE’re you going with that barrel!  FOR’ARD with it ’fore I make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!’

I wished I could talk like that.

When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off, I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with the boat—­the night watchman.  He snubbed my advances at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him.  So he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation.  He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice.  He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking about himself.  He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week—­ or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously.  What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin?  What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation?  He was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me.  As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.  He said he was the son of an English nobleman—­either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to ’one of them old, ancient colleges’—­he