rushed into the cabin, all talking in the loudest key, and dressed in every variety of mode, and seeming to strive with one another who should get first to the captain to pay his money. What does this mean? thought I; wherefore such hurry? “Why need they be so forward with death who calls not on them?” as Falstaff says. I soon found out the cause; they were securing births, and as they passed mine, they severally peeped into it; at length, one prying more earnestly than the others, exclaimed, “halloo, my hearty, you are in the wrong box; you must come out.” I made no reply, and he repeated his command to me to turn out—still I said nothing, and he turned to the captain: “I say captain, here’s a Jackson man in my birth.” “Yes,” said I, feeling my dander rise, as honest Jack Downing says, “and I shall assume the responsibility of staying in it.” Alas! I reckoned without _my host_, for the captain came up and desired me to evacuate the premises. “Why,” said I, “captain, I thought possession was eleven points of law.” “None of your nonsense, sir,” returned he, and took hold of my arm. Seeing how matters stood, I fixed myself, Dentatus-like, with my back to the side of the boat, and seizing my hickory stick, defended myself manfully, but numbers prevailed over valor, and I was, at last, ignominiously dragged forth, like Smith from the Chickahominy Swamp, to the no small amusement of the company, some of whom hurraed for old baldpate. Here was a pretty commencement of my journey! In the end, I was compelled to sleep upon a table, think o’ that! and imagine my horror when I found myself stretched out like a corpse, with a sheet over me!! All my previous fears of being scalded to death rushed upon my mind, and I made sure that this was indeed my winding-sheet. The thumping of the boat; the groans of the lever above, leaping and pitching like some vast giant struggling to be free; the snoring and snorting around me; the intense heat, produced by the juxta-position of so many human bodies, effectually banished sleep from my eyelids; I was “_in a state of dissolution and thaw_,” and wished myself anywhere else, even in “_the Domdaniel caves under the roots of Ocean_,” if there were such a place, so that I could escape my present thraldom. How often have I wondered, said I to myself, that people could be so foolhardy as to live at the foot of Mount Ætna or Vesuvius, where they are liable to be overwhelmed in a moment by burning lava; and here am I, lying near the crater of a volcano, without the hope of escape if there should be an eruption!! Overwhelmed by the oppressive weight of my thoughts, I sunk, from absolute exhaustion, about daybreak, into a doze, from which I was almost immediately aroused by a bell, which I mistook for the last trump, and springing up, perceived that it announced our arrival at the place of destination, and I was forced to huddle on my clothes as fast as possible. Such a scene of confusion