OLD KENNEDY, THE QUARTER-MASTER (Sailors Ashore.—Hornet and Peacock.) No. II. “Well—well—sailors, is queer animals any how—and always ready for a fight or frolic—and, so far as I sees, it don’t much matter which. Now, there was Captain ——, he was a Lieutenant then;—I was up in a draft of men, with him to the lakes in the war, and as there was no canals nor steamboats in them days, they marched us up sojer fashion. As we marched along the road, there was nothing but skylarking and frolic the whole time,—never a cow lying in the road but the lads must ride, nor a pig, but they must have a pull at his tail. I recollects, once’t, as we was passing a farm yard, Jim Albro, as was alongside of me—what does Jim do, but jumps over the fence and catches a goose out of the pond, and was clearing with it under his arm, but the farmer, too quick for him, grabs his musket out of his door, and levelling at Jim, roars out to drop the goose. Jim catches the goose’s neck tight in his hand, as it spraddles under his arm, and then turning his head over his shoulder, cries out, ‘_You fire_,—I’ll wring his neck off.’ And so Jim would have got off with the goose, but one of the officers seeing what was going on, orders Jim to drop the goose, and have a care how he aggravates the honest farmers in that ere sort of a way; for, ‘By the powers!’ said he, ‘Mister Jim Albro—this isn’t the first time, and if I hear of the like agin from you,—but your back and the boatswain’s mate shall scrape an acquaintance the first moment we come within the smell of a tarred ratlin.’ “It was wrong, to be sure, for Bill to take the man’s goose, seeing as how it was none of his; but there was one affair that same day, as the lads turned up to, and though a steady man, I’m free to confess I had a hand in’t. Why, what do you think sir, but as we what was bound for to fight the battles of our country—what do you think, but as we comes to one of them big gates they has on the roads, but the feller as keeps it, damme, sir, what does he do? but makes all fast, and swear that we shan’t go through without paying! I’m free to confess, sir, that that ere gate went off its hinges a little quicker than the chain of our best bower ever run through the hawse hole. A cummudgeonly son of a land lubber,—as if, because we didn’t wear long-tail coats, and high-heel boots, we was to pay like horses and oxen! If the miserable scamp hadn’t’ve vanished like a streak into the woods, we’d have paid him out of his own tar bucket, and rolled him over in the feathers of one of his wife’s own beds. But, d’ye see, that wasn’t the end of it. Them ere lawyers gets hold of it—and it was the first time any of them land-shirks ever came athwart my hawse.