You knew them at once by one of them giving the song for the topsail halliards, instead of the merchantmen's bull's chorus: indeed, I could always pick off the dashing man-o'-war's men, by face and eye alone, out from among the others, who looked as sober and solitary, with their serious faces and way of going about a thing, as if every one of them was the whole crew. I once read a bit of poetry called the "Ancient Mariner," to old Jacobs, who by the bye is something of a breed betwixt the two kinds, and his remark was--"That old chap warn't used to hoisting all together with a run, your honour! By his looks, I'd say he was bred where there was few in a watch, and the watch-tackle laid out pretty often for an eke to drag down the fore-tack." As I was riding down to Croydon in Surrey, where my mother and sister had gone to live, I fell in with a sample of the hard shifts the men-o-war's-men were put to in getting across from harbour to some merchant port, when all their earnings were chucked away. It was at a little town called Bromley, where I brought to by the door of a tavern and had a drink for the horse, with a bottle of cider for myself at the open window, the afternoon being hot. There was a crowd of townspeople at the other end of the street, country bumpkins and boys--women looking out at the windows, dogs barking, and children shouting--the whole concern bearing down upon us. "What's all this?" said I to the ostler. "Don't know, sir," said he, scratching his head; "'tis very hodd, sir! That corner _is_ rather a sharp turn for the coach, sir, and she do sometimes run over a child there, or somethink. But 'taint her time yet! Nothink else hever 'appens 'ere, sir." As soon as I could hear or see distinctly for the confusion, I observed the magnet of it to be a party of five or six regular blue-jackets, a good deal battered in their rig, who were roaring out sea-songs in grand style as they came along, leading what I thought at first was a bear. The chief words I heard were what I knew well. "We'll disregard their tommy-hawks, likewise their scalping-knifes--and fight alongside of our mates to save our precious lives--like British tars and souldiers in the North Americay!" On getting abreast of the inn-door, and finding an offing with good holding-ground, I suppose, they hove to and struck up the "Buffalo," that finest of chaunts for the weather forecastle with a spanking breeze, outward bound, and the pilot lately dropped--