“Pretty soon, up runs our motto-flag, the dying words of our hero Lawrence—‘_Don’t give up the ship_,’ and floats proudly from our main, and then the general order was passed down the line by trumpet, ‘_Each ship, lay your enemy alongside_’—and if you ever seen a flock of wild geese flying south’erd in the fall of the year, you’ll have some idee of us, as we went down into action. The men was full of spirit, and panting for a fight, and even them as was so sick, as to be hardly able to stand, insisted upon taking their places at the guns. I recollects one in particular—he was a carpenter’s mate, a steady man, from Newport—he crawls up when we beat to quarters, and seats himself upon the head of one of the pumps, with the sounding-rod in his hand, looking as yellow as if he had just been dragged out of a North Carolina cypress swamp: but one of the officers comes up to him as he was sitting there, and says—‘You are too sick to be here, my man,—there’s no use of your being exposed for nothing—you had better go below.’ ‘If you please, sir,’ says the poor fellow, ‘if I can do nothing else, I can save the time of a better man, and sit here and sound the pump.’ Well, sir, as we bore down, the English occasionally tried our distance by a shot, and when we was within about a mile of ’em, one comes ricochetting across the water, bounds over the bulwarks, and takes that man’s head as clean off his shoulders, as if it had been done with his own broad-axe. I have hearn say, that ‘every bullet has its billet,’ and that is sartin, that it’s no use to dodge a shot, for if you are destined to fall by a shot, you will sartin fall by that same shot; and I bears in mind, that an English sailor, one of our prisoners, told me that in a ship of their’n a feller, as skulked in the cable-tier, during an action with the French, was found dead with a spent forty-two resting on his neck. The ball had come in at the starn-port—struck one of the beams for’ard, and tumbled right in upon him, breaking his neck, as he lay snugly coiled away in the cable-tier. No, no—misfortins and cannon shot is very much alike—there’s no dodging—every man must stand up to his work, and take his chance—if they miss, he is ready when they pipes to grog—if they hit, the purser’s book is squared, and no more charges is scored agin him.