is the result of twenty-two years of hard labor and exposure—­ worked like a horse, and treated like a dog.’’ As he had grown older, he began to feel the necessity of some provision for his later years, and came gradually to the conviction that rum had been his worst enemy.  One night, in Havana, a young shipmate of his was brought aboard drunk, with a dangerous gash in his head, and his money and new clothes stripped from him.  Harris had been in hundreds of such scenes as these, but in his then state of mind it fixed his determination, and he resolved never to taste a drop of strong drink of any kind.  He signed no pledge, and made no vow, but relied on his own strength of purpose.  The first thing with him was a reason, and then a resolution, and the thing was done.  The date of his resolution he knew, of course, to the very hour.  It was three years before I became acquainted with him, and during all that time nothing stronger than cider or coffee had passed his lips.  The sailors never thought of enticing Tom to take a glass, any more than they would of talking to the ship’s compass.  He was now a temperate man for life, and capable of filling any berth in a ship, and many a high station there is on shore which is held by a meaner man.

He understood the management of a ship upon scientific principles, and could give the reason for hauling every rope; and a long experience, added to careful observation at the time, gave him a knowledge of the expedients and resorts for times of hazard, for which I became much indebted to him, as he took the greatest pleasure in opening his stores of information to me, in return for what I was enabled to do for him.  Stories of tyranny and hardship which had driven men to piracy; of the incredible ignorance of masters and mates, and of horrid brutality to the sick, dead, and dying; as well as of the secret knavery and impositions practised upon seamen by connivance of the owners, landlords, and officers,—­ all these he had, and I could not but believe them; for he made the impression of an exact man, to whom exaggeration was falsehood; and his statements were always credited.  I remember, among other things, his speaking of a captain whom I had known by report, who never handed a thing to a sailor, but put it on deck and kicked it to him; and of another, who was highly connected in Boston, who absolutely murdered a lad from Boston who went out with him before the mast to Sumatra, by keeping him hard at work while ill of the coast fever, and obliging him to sleep in the close steerage. (The same captain has since died of the same fever on the same coast.)

In fact, taking together all that I learned from him of seamanship, of the history of sailors’ lives, of practical wisdom, and of human nature under new circumstances and strange forms of life,—­ a great history from which many are shut out,—­ I would not part with the hours I spent in the watch with that man for the gift of many hours to be passed in study and intercourse with even the best of society.