This, in its turn, reminds me of a piece of cock-pit manners, which truth obliges me to divulge, although, certainly, not very much to our credit. It was the duty of the unfortunate wight who sat nearest the candle—grievously misnamed the ‘light’—to snuff off its monstrous cauliflower of a head from time to time; and certainly his office was no sinecure. Sometimes, however, either from being too much absorbed in his book, or from his hand being tired, he might forget to ‘top the glim,’ as it was called—glim being, I suppose, a contraction of the too obvious word glimmer. On these occasions of neglect, when things were returning fast to their primeval darkness, any one of the company was entitled to call out “Top!” upon which all the rest were bound to vociferate the same word, and he who was the last to call out “Top!” was exposed to one of the following disagreeable alternatives—either to get up and snuff the candle, at whatever distance he might be seated, or to have the burning snuff thrown in his face by any one who was within reach, and chose to pinch it off with his finger and thumb. It is true there was always some trouble in this operation, and some little risk of burning the fingers, to say nothing of the danger to His Majesty’s ship; but the delightful task of teaching a messmate good breeding, by tossing a handful of burning tallow-candle snuff in his eyes, was, of course, a happiness too great to be resisted. In speaking thus of the midshipmen’s birth, and of their occasional ruggedness of manners, I should be doing wrong to leave an impression that they were a mere lawless set of harumscarum scamps. Quite the contrary; for we had a code of laws for our government, which, for precision and distinctness of purpose, might have rivalled many of those promulgated by the newest-born states of the world, in these days of political parturition. I observe, that young countries, like young people, whether in a midshipman’s mess, or any where else, delight in the indulgence of the fond and false idea, that it is easy to regulate the fluctuations of human nature exactly as they please, by the mere force of written constitutions. They always ‘remember to forget,’ that institutions, to be in the smallest degree effective in practice, must be made to fit the existing state of society, and that society cannot possibly be made to fit them. They almost all run away, however, with the vainest of vain notions, that established habits, old prejudices, with all the other fixed and peculiar circumstances of the time and place in which they find themselves, have become, of a sudden, so pliable, that they can be essentially and speedily modified by artificial legislation alone! On this fallacious principle we framed a set of regulations for our mess, of which I recollect only one, giving, I admit, rather a queer idea of the state of things in our maritime world. It ran thus:—“If any member of the larboard mess shall so far