“Folk ashore do n’t know how sailors sometimes live,” said Jack, holding a large spoon filled with the soup ready to plunge into a tolerably capacious mouth.

“Or how they sometimes starve,” answered Rose.  “Remember our own situation, less than forty-eight hours since!”

“All very true, Miss Rose; yet, you see, turtle-soup brings us up, a’ter all.  Would you like a glass of wine, maty?”

“Very much indeed, Jack, after so luscious a soup; but wishing for it will not bring it here.”

“That remains to be seen, sir.  I call this a bottle of something that looks wery much like a wine.”

“Claret, as I live!  Why, where should light-house keepers get the taste for claret?”

“I’ve thought of that myself, Mr. Mulford, and have supposed that some of Uncle Sam’s officers have brought the liquor to this part of the world.  I understand a party on ’em was here surveyin’ all last winter.  It seems they come in the cool weather, and get their sights and measure their distances, and go home in the warm weather, and work out their traverses in the shade, as it might be.”

“This seems likely, Jack; but, come whence it may it is welcome, and we will taste it.”

Mulford then drew the cork of this mild and grateful liquor, and helped his companions and himself.  In this age of moral tours de force, one scarcely dare say anything favourable of a liquid that even bears the name of wine, or extol the shape of a bottle.  It is truly the era of exaggeration.  Nothing is treated in the old-fashioned, natural, common sense way.  Virtue is no longer virtue, unless it get upon stilts; and, as for sin’s being confined to “transgression against the law of God,” audacious would be the wretch who should presume to limit the sway of the societies by any dogma so narrow!  A man may be as abstemious as an anchorite and get no credit for it, unless “he sigu the pledge;” or, signing the pledge, he may get fuddled in corners, and be cited as a miracle of sobriety.  The test of morals is no longer in the abuse of the gifts of Providence, but in their use; prayers are deserting the closet for the corners of streets, and charity (not the giving of alms) has got to be so earnest in the demonstration of its nature, as to be pretty certain to “begin at home,” and to end where it begins.  Even the art of mendacity has been aroused by the great progress which is making by all around it, and many manifest the strength of their ambition by telling ten lies where their fathers would have been satisfied with telling only one.  This art has made an extraordinary progress within the last quarter of a century, aspiring to an ascendency that was formerly conceded only to truth, until he who gains his daily bread by it has some such contempt for the sneaking wretch who does business on the small scale, as the slayer of his thousands in the field is known to entertain for him who kills only a single man in the course of a long life.