‘No, no, Sam--you’re right enough--your _March-o’-Mind_ men must now come your simmy-dimmy quiv’ring quivers--tip ye soft sentimental touches--sigh away like ladies in love, an’ never sing nothin’ but your silly sicknin’ stuff, as often used to frighten the geese an’ make ’em cackle in the coop, for all the world like the comin’ of a heavy hurricane. Moreover, your _March-o’-Mind_ men never will sing a single stave as admits of the main thing--for what’s a song as won’t allow all hands to jine in reg’lar coal-box? (chorus). No, no, your _March-o’-Mind_ men haven’t, you may depend on it, the mind of men--they think far more like people as rigs it in petticoats, nor they as tog in trowsers. Now what looks more young-ladyish nor to see a fellor with a fist like a shoulder of mutton, flinging his flipper about an’ suitin’ his antics to his song, as he snivels out “Strike--strike the light guitar!”... Then, again, we’d another chap--a chap, too, as big and bulky as a bullock--easin’ it off an’ mincin’ it out like a lank boarding’-school miss--“I’d be a butterfly, born in a bower”’ (_Naval Sketch-book_, 2nd series, i. 236). Dana noticed the same phenomenon amongst merchant sailors about 1834. ‘I shall never forget,’ he writes, ‘hearing an old salt who had broken his voice by hard drinking on shore, and bellowing from the mast-head in a hundred north-westers, singing with all manner of ungovernable trills and quavers, in the high notes breaking into rough falsetto, and in the low ones growling along like the dying-away of the boatswain’s “All hands ahoy!” down the hatchway, “Oh no, we never mention him!”[_sic_]: ‘Perhaps, like me, he struggles with Each feeling of regret: But if he’s loved as I have loved, He never can forget.’ The last line he roared out at the top of his voice, breaking each word into half a dozen syllables, This was very popular, and Jack was called on every night to give them his sentimental song’ (_Two Years before the Mast_, chap. xxix.). In conclusion it is only necessary to give some short account of the sources from which the present collection has been compiled.