So before I was six I had heard of sloops and ferry-boats and belaying-pins and admirals and salt-junk, and longed to hear the wind whistling through the maintopgallantmast, and could say “boat-swain” as glibly as any sailor afloat. But father was in moderate circumstances; and so, much as he would have liked to, he could not afford to send me to sea when I was a boy, and that is why my one-and-twentieth birthday came and went and I had never been farther from Birmingham than my legs could carry me in a day; but you may be sure that I subscribed to the “Seaman’s Daily,” and through a friend who knew a sailor I had picked up such terms as “amidships,” “deck,” “boom,” “bilge-water,” “forecastle,” and the like, so that I was a seaman in everything save actual experience. And in the amateur dramatic society of which I was a member I always played sailors’ parts, and did them so well that when we played “Hamlet” they changed the part of the grave-digger to that of a sailor for me, and I made a great hit in it. The one who played Hamlet didn’t like the change, as it interfered with his lines and his business with a skull, and he refused to come on at all in that act; but I sang a sea-song instead, and the newspaper came out and said that my singing was no worse than his acting would have been, which I thought pretty neat. But enough of that. I was always fond of joking, and had nigh unto a score of comical sayings that I used to repeat to my friends when they would come to our house of an evening; but they didn’t often come. My father said I was as comical a lad as he ever knew, and would slap me on the back and roar that it was the funniest thing he had heard in a twelvemonth when I made one particular joke, the tenor of which I forget now. But all the jokes dealt with the sea. Well, so much for my life up to my one-and-twentieth birthday. You have learned that if ever a body was fitted for a sea life, that body was mine. By the time I was six-and-twenty I don’t believe there was a sea term that I did not have at my tongue’s end, and I always wore my trousers wide at the lower end, and kept a chew of tobacco in my mouth day and night, although after a time I failed to notice any taste in it. It was a gladsome sight to see me go rolling to my work in the cutler’s shop (for I still followed the old trade), with a hearty “Ho, landsman! good mornin’ to ye!” to all I met, in true sailor fashion. Our fare at home consisted of loblolly, ship’s-biscuit, salt-junk, and plum-duff, with water drawn from casks. My dear old mother used sometimes to wish for home-made bread and fresh meat and vegetables and pump water; and I remember, one winter, brother died of the scurvy; but I was better content than if he had died of some landsman’s complaint, and mother was glad to put up with anything, she was so proud that I was to be a seaman. [Illustration]