set ashore from the other vessels, and had multiplied and formed a large commonwealth.  From the door of his galley the cook used to watch them in their manoeuvres, setting up a shout and clapping his hands whenever Bess came off victorious in the struggles for pieces of raw hide and half-picked bones which were lying about the beach.  During the day, he saved all the nice things, and made a bucket of swill, and asked us to take it ashore in the gig, and looked quite disconcerted when the mate told him that he would pitch the swill overboard, and him after it, if he saw any of it go into the boats.  We told him that he thought more about the pig than he did about his wife, who lived down in Robinson’s Alley; and, indeed, he could hardly have been more attentive, for he actually, on several nights, after dark, when he thought he would not be seen, sculled himself ashore in a boat, with a bucket of nice swill, and returned like Leander from crossing the Hellespont.

The next Sunday the other half of our crew went ashore on liberty, and left us on board, to enjoy the first quiet Sunday we had had upon the coast.  Here were no hides to come off, and no southeasters to fear.  We washed and mended our clothes in the morning, and spent the rest of the day in reading and writing.  Several of us wrote letters to send home by the Lagoda.  At twelve o’clock, the Ayacucho dropped her fore topsail, which was a signal for her sailing.  She unmoored and warped down into the bight, from which she got under way.  During this operation her crew were a long time heaving at the windlass, and I listened to the musical notes of a Sandwich-Islander named Mahanna, who ``sang out’’ for them.  Sailors, when heaving at a windlass, in order that they may heave together, always have one to sing out, which is done in high and long-drawn notes, varying with the motion of the windlass.  This requires a clear voice, strong lungs, and much practice, to be done well.  This fellow had a very peculiar, wild sort of note, breaking occasionally into a falsetto.  The sailors thought that it was too high, and not enough of the boatswain hoarseness about it; but to me it had a great charm.  The harbor was perfectly still, and his voice rang among the hills as though it could have been heard for miles.  Toward sundown, a good breeze having sprung up, the Ayacucho got under way, and with her long, sharp head cutting elegantly through the water on a taut bowline, she stood directly out of the harbor, and bore away to the southward.  She was bound to Callao, and thence to the Sandwich Islands, and expected to be on the coast again in eight or ten months.