The annoyance from the enemy's rifles was a good deal lessened by the brigade of sailors. These extraordinary fellows delighted in hunting the “_Munseers_,” as they termed the French; and a more formidable pack never was unkennelled. Armed, each with an immense long pole or pike, a cutlass, and a pistol, they appeared to be a sort of force that, in case of a sortie, or where execution was to be done in the way of storming, would have been as destructive as a thousand hungry tigers: as it was, they annoyed the French skirmishers in all directions, by their irregular and extraordinary attacks. They usually went out in parties, as if they were going to hunt a wild beast, and no huntsman ever followed the chase with more delight. The French might fairly exclaim with the frogs in the fable—“Ah! Monsieur _Bull_, what is sport to you, is death to us.” Regularly every day after their mess (for they messed generally on a green in the Village of East Zuburg) they would start off to their “hunt,” as they called it, in parties headed by a petty officer. Then they would leap the dykes, which their poles enabled them to do, and dash through those which they could not otherwise cross; they were like a set of Newfoundland dogs in the marshes, and when they spied a few riflemen of the French, they ran at them helter-skelter: then pistol, cutlass, and pike, went to work in downright earnest. The French soldiers did not at all relish the tars—and no wonder; for the very appearance of them was terrific, and quite out of the usual order of things. Each man seemed a sort of Paul Jones—tarred, belted, and cutlassed as they were. Had we had occasion to storm Flushing, I have no doubt that they would have carried the breach themselves. The scenes which their eccentricities every hour presented, were worthy of the pencil of Hogarth. Among the most humorous of these, were their drills, musters, and marchings, or as they generally called such proceedings, “_playing at soldiers_.” All that their officers did, had no effect in keeping either silence or regularity; those officers, however, were “part and parcel of the same material as the Jacks themselves, and as able to go through the pipe-clay regularity of rank and file, as to deliver a sermon on the immortality of the soul.” But the fact is, they were not either expected or intended to be _regular_ troops, and their drills were merely adopted to teach them to keep together in line when marching from one place to another; so that they might not go about the country after the manner of a troop of donkeys. These marches and drills afforded the highest degree of amusement, both to soldiers and officers; the disproportion in the sizes of the men—the front rank man, perhaps, four feet one, while the rear rank man, was six feet two; the giving of the word from the “middy,” always accompanied by a “G—— d——n;” the gibes and jeers of the men themselves. “Heads up, _you_