As the ships employed in the whale fishery in the spring and summer were usually _laid up_ during the rest of the year, it was the frequent practice of the officers, who were generally engaged from year to year, to embark as seamen in the coasting trade during the interval of winter. My Father, habitually energetic and industrious, and having now an increasing family to support, adopted this commendable course. On one occasion it so happened that he was employed in a vessel whose chief officer, the mate, was a young man possessing a full share of self-conceit, evinced by a not unfrequent exhibition of supercilious assumption of superiority—characteristics excessively obnoxious to my Father’s manly disposition. But, notwithstanding the occasional exhibition of an offensive manner towards himself as well as others, such was always his high sense of the _duty of obedience to superiors_, and of the importance, in principle, of _proper subordination_, that he bore with restrained feelings in silence this youthful and vexatious folly. An occasion, however, occurred, in which he might legitimately suffer the fault to chastise itself, and it is to that to which my story refers. The vessel was lying in port about to take in ballast. In this operation, which is often effected (as in this case) by the shovel of “ballast-heavers” out of loaded “lighters” laid alongside the ship, there is a liability to scatter a good deal of the shingle or other material, so as to fall overboard to the encumbrance of the harbour. To prevent this damage to the navigation, it is in many places a harbour regulation that a canvas screen or sail, called a “port-sail,” should be placed below the small port-hole cut in the side of the ship for the reception of ballast, so as to catch the ballast-heavers’ scatterings. In the good ship, the ——, however, this canvas protector happened to be wanting when ballast was about to be taken in. The mate, with a manner (it is presumed) of excessive superciliousness, came to my Father with a _“bolt”_ (or roll) of canvas, asking him, as if doubting his capacity, whether he could make such a thing? and then requesting him to set immediately to work to supply the lack of port-sails. Assuming a look of meekest simplicity, which for such a just retribution my Father could well put on, he quietly asked, in reference to the order to make port-sails, “how _many_ he was to make?” Mistaking the look of simplicity for simpleness itself, the young officer, as he turned jeeringly away, replied, “_half-a-dozen_, to be sure.”