or by definite knowledge of their origin: the first are of very little value, for an English chant, with its local allusions, might be very readily altered into an American one by the substitution of American names; and in regard to the second, as has been said, the songs were born, and passed from mouth to mouth, and from ship to ship, without any one's knowing or caring where they originated. Nevertheless, the American sailors, when there were American sailors, had as strong a national and provincial feeling as those of any other country; were capable of making their own chants, if not as much given to improvisation as those of the Latin races; and had a selection of local names as sonorous and as readily adapted to the needs of a rhythmical chorus as those of any English-speaking people. The Rio Grande and the Shenandoah were as mouth-filling and sonorous as the High Barbarie or any of the refrains of the English shanties, and the American sailor sheeted home his canvas with Virginia Ashore, or Baltimore, or Down to Mobile Bay in his remembrance as well as on his lips. Premising that American shanties are not American sea songs in any definite sense of the term, and fulfill only the conditions to which they are subject as aids to labor and stimulants to exertion, we may take a specimen or two to show what they were like. It is needless to say that neither the words nor a musical notation would give any idea of their effect when sung with full-throated chorus to sea and sky, and that their peculiar melodious cadence and inflection can be caught only by hearing them. Like the chants of the negro slaves, which they resemble in many respects, musical notes would give only the skeleton of the melody, which depends for its execution upon an element which it defies the powers of art to symbolize. They have various forms,--a continued and unbroken melody, as when turning the capstan or pumping, or they show an emphatic accentuation at regular intervals, as when stretching out a bowline with renewed pulls; and such as they are, they are given precisely as sung, with a dependence upon the reader's imagination to supply in some degree the cadence and accentuation. The following are good specimens of the bowline chants. Solo. I wish I was in Mobile Bay, Chorus. Way-hay, knock a man down! Solo. A-rolling cotton night and day, Chorus. This is the time to knock a man down! And so on _ad infinitum_, until the hoarse "Belay!" of the mate or the "bosun" ends it. Oh, Shenandoah's a rolling river, _Hooray_, you rolling river, Oh, Shenandoah's a rolling river, _Ah-hah_, I'm bound away to the wild Missouri! Oh, Shenandoah's a packet sailor, etc. My Tommy's gone, and I 'll go too, Hurrah, you high-low! For without Tommy I can't do, My Tommy 's gone a high-low! My Tommy's gone to the Eastern shore, Chorus.