I had a talk with Coleman the other day. This man is the graven image of the conventional Mephistopheles, and arrived, together with Olsen, at New York, on the American ship “S. P. Hitchcock” a fortnight before we sailed, ninety-two days from Honolulu. Coleman couldn’t say enough in favor of Captain Gates (indeed, every one speaks well of him), adding, “She’s a bloody sight different from this packet.” In saying which he alluded to Captain Scruggs’s abusive manner when talking to the men, which is entirely unnecessary and doesn’t do any good. Sailors, of course, can’t bear this when they are doing their best, and will make it just as hard as they can for a captain in return. In the face of several recent outrageous pieces of cruelty on our ships, I do not think that our skipper will personally lay hands on the men. Still, you cannot tell to what length he will go when we have been together three or four months. The mate approached us last evening and gave it as his opinion that we’d never see the big steel Bath ship “Dirigo” again. “Why not?” said I; “she had not been more than one hundred and sixty days at sea when we sailed.” “I know; that’s all right,” he answered; “but she was spoken off the Horn by the Briddish ship ‘Howth,’ that arrived a month before we left. Oh, you’ll never see _her_ again.” That’s the way with this individual,--he always thinks that something is going to happen. Then he suddenly asked,-- “Do you know wot Dirigo means?” I told him that I did know what it meant,--“I direct.” “Naw,” he replied; “hit’s the motto of the State of Maine, and means ‘go ahead’”; and when I tried to tell him that that was a very free translation of it, he said, “I don’t care for no translation; in the Greek language it means ‘go ahead.’” Such incontrovertible evidence was, of course, indisputable. Mr. Rarx, the second mate, is of an altogether different type from Mr. Goggins. He has more natural intelligence, is very neat and clean, and is, besides, a far better seaman, and handles the men in such a way as to get twice as much work accomplished in a watch as the mate. But I am inclined to think that he has a very bad temper, from the motion he made with a fid the other day at two of the sailors who had made a mistake with a splice; and when he told me about an easy voyage which he had just made in the “William H. Smith,” and added, “I didn’t have to speak cross to the men once from Singapore to New York,” he looked at me very hard, and it seemed as though he were “sounding” me, to see whether I would believe improbable yarns. Still, I may be doing him injustice.