the port-hole, which this terrible shark received into its jaws, and twisted its body most provokingly at the delicious mouthful. Hereupon our pensioner—it was before, he reminds you, he had lost a limb—asks leave of the first lieutenant (for the captain was ashore) to have a bout with the shark: leave being granted, all the crew are quickly in the shrouds, and upon the hammock netting, to see Tom “tackle the shark.” Our pensioner now enters into a minute detail of how, having armed himself with a long knife, he jumped overboard, dived under the shark, whom he saw approaching with distended jaws, and inflicted a tremendous wound with the knife in the belly of the fish; this is repeated thrice, when the shark turns itself upon its back—a boat is let down, and both the conqueror and the conquered are quickly received upon deck. You are doubtless astonished at this; he, however, adds to your surprise by telling you that the mess regaled off the piece of beef recovered from the fish; be more astounded at this, although mingle no doubt in your astonishment, and he will straightway promise some day to treat your eyes with a sight of a set of chequer men, cut from the very dorsal bone of the immolated shark! To be the hearer of a sailor’s tale is something like undergoing the ancient ordeal of red-hot ploughshares; be innocent of unbelief, and you may, as was held, journey in safety; doubt the smallest point, and you are quickly withered into nought. What an odd contrast to his early life is the state of a Greenwich pensioner! It is as though a part of the angry and foaming sea should lie stagnant in a bathing tub. All his business is to recount his former adventures—to plod about, and look with a disdainful eye at trees and bricks and mortar; or, when he would indulge in a serious fit of spleen, to walk down to the river’s side, and let his gall feed upon the mishaps of London apprentices, who, fearless of consequences, may have ventured some five miles from home in _not_ a “trim-built wherry.” A Greenwich pensioner fresh from sea is a most preposterous creature; he gets up every morning for a week, a month, and still finds himself in the same place; he knows not what to make of it—he feels the strangeness of his situation, and would, had he the patience and the wit, liken himself to a hundred unsettled things. Compare him to a hippopotamus in a gentleman’s park, and he would tell you he had in his day seen a hippopotamus, and then, with a good-natured grunt, acquiesce in the resemblance; or to a jolly-boat in a flower garden; or to a sea-gull in the cage of a canary; or to a porpoise upon a hearthrug; or to a boatswain’s whistle in a nursery; or to a marling-spike in a milliner’s workroom; or a tar-barrel in a confectioner’s; with any one or all of these misplaced articles would our unsettled pensioner sympathise, until time shall have reconciled him to his asylum; and even then his fancy,