No voice in this chorus dwelt more decidedly by itself than the shrill one belonging to the small, spare man already spoken of as having a buxom young wife and blue cotton overalls. During his wife's adjournment to the ladies' cabin, this person, I am obliged to record, had become boisterously drunk,--a condition in which the contradictory elements that make up the characters of most men are generally developed to an instructive extent. In his first paroxysm, the fighting man within him was all aroused, as is generally the case with diminutive men, when under the influence of drink. Already he had tucked his sleeves up to fight a large German musician, who could have put him into the bell of his brass-horn and played him out, without much trouble. But the song pacified him; and, with a misty sense of his importance in a convivial point of view, on account of the manner in which he had acquitted himself in the chorus, he now essayed a higher flight, and treated the party to a new version of "The Pope," oddly condensed into one verse, as follows:-- "The Pope, he leads a happy life, He fears no married care nor strife, His wives are many as be will: I would the Sultan's place, then, fill!" At this moment the buxom young wife descended suddenly from the upper deck by the forecastle-ladder, like Nemesis from a thunder-cloud, and, seizing upon the small warbler, to whom she administered a preliminary shake which must have sadly changed the current of his ideas, drove him ignominiously before her toward the stern of the vessel, rapping him occasionally about the ears with the hard end of her fan, to keep him on a straight course. Persons who traced the matter farther said that he was driven all the way to the upper deck, pushed with gentle violence into a state-room, the door locked upon him, and the key pocketed by the lady, who said triumphantly, as she walked away,--"That's the Sultan's place for _him_, I guess!" The moral to this little episode is but a horn-book one, and without any pretension to didactic force: That respectable citizens, like the small, spare man, would do well, on excursion-trips or elsewhere, to avoid whiskey and black-guards; and that wives might be saved a deal of trouble by keeping their eyes permanently on their husbands, when the latter are of uncertain ways.