Aforetime, when the mariner was entirely dependent on the winds and the tides to make his voyage, he was, as everybody knows, a peculiarly impulsive, generous, faithful and credulous mortal in his love affairs. Once ashore, he spliced the main-brace, sneered oathfully at land-lubbers, hitched up his trousers and ran alongside the first trim-looking craft who angled for his attentions--and his money. These fine salt-water impulses, begotten of a twelve or fifteen-months' voyage, have mostly vanished. Steam has greatly revolutionized Jack's sweet-hearting. He comes to port every fortnight, or so; he wears dry goods and jewelry of the latest mode; and he marries a wife, or divorces a wife, with the same conventional _sangfroid_ of any mercantile "drummer" who travels by railroad. The conjugal history of that distinguished son of Neptune, Captain Oliver Perry Hazard, now to be related, haply has a delectable smack of mercantile jack's old-time methods, mingled with the shrewder utilitarianism of the steamship Jack of to-day. Up in the estuary called the Y, and at the mouth of the river Amstel, lay, some years ago, the good American ship which had safely borne young Hazard across the Atlantic. He was a handsome, a tall, and a lively young man of five and twenty; and, with a vivacious young mariner's curiosity, he went ashore to sample the "Holland," for which the Dutch are so famous, to stroll across the two hundred and ninety-odd bridges, and to take an observation of the pretty girls that loomed up in sedate but ample old Amsterdam. There, in a saloon where the gin was a most divine Hippocrene, and the cigars fragrant, Oliver beheld a tight little craft, and straightway ran up his flag as a salute. She was a brunette, with as pretty a form as the sun had ever kissed. Her dark, dark eyes were large, lustrous and superb. Oliver shares Lord Byron's weakness for handsome eyes. He's very fond of them. The name of the Amsterdam divinity was Marie. He resembled the same illustrious poet in his predilection for the name of Mary or Marie. He thought there was a sweetness in it. And so he sank into the quicksands of Eros, right over his tarry toplights, and, nothing loth, Marie accompanied him in the Avernian descent. Every morning that he lay in the Dutch port our mariner squared his yard-arms and trimmed himself for bringing-to alongside Marie. Every night the tics were getting tauter, and when he proposed that she should cross with him to England there was no pitching on her part worth speaking of. And so they voyaged to Albion and to several ports in Gaul; and there was no lee-way in their love, but still the tics were getting tauter, evidencing strong probabilities of a life cruise together.