in,[9] and beans to-morrow." Can any philosophy soar higher than that, in contentment with small things? Plain living and high thinking! Diogenes wasn't in it. As the warrant officers of the ship were of the generation before us, we heard from their lips many racy and entertaining experiences of the former navy, most of which naturally have escaped me, while others I have dropped all along the line of my preceding reminiscences where they seemed to come in aptly. Each of the four had very different characteristics, and I fancy they did not agree very well together. All have long since gone to their rest; peace be with them! Four is an awkwardly small number for a mess-table of equals; friction is emphasized by narrowness of sphere. "I didn't like the man," said the boatswain afterwards to me of the sailmaker, narrating the destruction of the _Congress_; "but he is brave, brave as can be. Getting the wounded over the side to put them ashore, he was as cool as though nothing was happening. The great guns weren't so bad," he continued--"but the rifle-bullets that came singing along in clouds like mosquitoes! Yah!" he used to snap, each time he told me the tale, slapping his ears right and left, as one does at the hum of those intrusive insects. He did not like the carpenter, either, for reasons of another kind. They were both humorists, but of a different order. Indeed, I don't think that the boatswain, though slightly sardonic in expression, suspected himself of humor; but he really came at times pretty close to wit, if that be a perception of incongruities, as I have heard said. He was telling one day of some mishap that befell a vessel, wherein the officer in charge showed the happy blending of composure and ignorance we sometimes find; a condition concerning which a sufferer once said of himself, "I never open my mouth but I put my foot in it;" a confusion of metaphor, and suggestion of physical contortion, not often so neatly combined in a dozen words. The boatswain commented: "He didn't mind. He didn't know what to do, but there he stood, looking all the time as happy as a duck barefooted." A duck shod, and the consequent expression of its countenance, presents to my mind infinite entertainment. Our first lieutenant, under whom immediately he worked, was a great trial to him. He was an elderly man, as first lieutenants of big ships were then, great with the paint-brush and tar-pot, traces of which were continually surprising one's clothes; mighty also in that lavish swashing of sea-water which is called washing decks, and in the tropics is not so bad; but otherwise, while he was one of the kindliest of men, the go was pretty well out of him. "Yes," the boatswain used to say grimly,--he seldom smiled,--"the first lieutenant is like an old piece of soap--half wore out. Go day, come day, God send Sunday; that's he."