There was in the hero of this anecdote a vein of eccentricity even then, and he eventually died insane and young. I knew him only slightly, but familiarly as to face. He had mild blue eyes and curly brown hair, with a constant half-smile in eyes as well as mouth. In temperament he was Dutch to the backbone--at least as we imagine Dutch. A comical anecdote was told me of him a few years later, illustrating his self-possession--cool to impudence. He was serving on one of our big steam-sloops, a flag-ship at the time, and had charge of working the cables on the gun-deck when anchoring. Going into a port where the water was very deep--Rio de Janeiro, I believe--the chain cables "got away," as the expression is; control was lost, and shackle after shackle tore out of the hawse-holes, leaping and thumping, rattling and roaring, stirring a lot of dust besides. Indeed, the violent friction of iron against iron in such cases not infrequently generates a stream of sparks. The weight of twenty fathoms of this linked iron mass hanging outside, aided by the momentum already established by the anchor's fall through a hundred feet, of course drags after it all that lies unstoppered within. I need not tell those who have witnessed such a commotion that the orderly silence of a ship of war breaks down somewhat. Every one who has any right to speak shouts, and repeats, in rapid succession, "Haul-to that chain! Why the something or other don't you haul-to?" while the unhappy compressor-men, saving their own wind to help their arms, struggle wildly with the situation, under a storm of obloquy. The admiral--by this time we had admirals--was a singular man, something of a lawyer, acute, thinking he knew just how far he might go in any case, and given at times to taking liberties with subordinates, which were not to them always as humorous as they seemed to him. In this instance he miscalculated somewhat. He was on deck at the moment, and when the chain had been at last stopped and secured, he said to the captain, "Alfred, send for the young man in charge of those chains, and give him a good setting-down. Ask him what he means by letting such things happen. Ride him down like a main-tack, Alfred--like the main-tack!" The main-tack is the chief rope controlling the biggest sail in the ship, and at times, close on the wind, it has to be got down into place by the brute force of half a hundred men, inch by inch, pull by pull. That is called riding down, and is clearly a process the reverse of conciliatory. The Dutchman was sent for, and soon his questioning blue eyes appeared over the hatch coaming. Alfred--as my own name is Alfred, I may explain that I was not that captain--Alfred was a mild person, and clearly did not like his job; he could not have come up to the admiral's standard. The latter saw it, and intervened: "Perhaps you had better leave it to me. I'll settle him." Fixing his eyes on the offender, he said, sternly,