them pleasures rather--than the honest man at the wheel, to explain the use and properties of the Compass: he boxed it again and again for the benefit of the gaping neophyte; a benevolent smile, and the twinkling of his blue eyes, declaring that he felt amply repaid by the supposed proficiency of his pupil,--when, all of a sudden, his well-earned pride was dashed to the deck by the pupil’s turning away on his heel, with a hunch of his shoulders, a blank look, and a dissatisfied grunt, exclaiming, “Well, arter all, I don’t see how the turning round of that ’ere little needle can move about the rudder!” I should have been no Christian man, but a brute beast, had I not sympathised with the feelings of the steersman. Contempt took the lead. All “the dismal hiss of universal scorn,” ascribed to Milton’s devils, seemed condensed into his whistle. Next came Resentment, wishing back the Cockney-Tailor to his shop-board, sitting on his own needle--and then came Pity, inducing the milder reflection, “I wonder the poor gentleman’s friends allows him to go about by himself!” I doubt whether the force of contempt and pity could further go: and yet--to confess a truth--shall I?--dare I?--say, that to the intense sea-ignorance which incurred the scorn, anger, and compassion of our Palinurus, I look back with ENVY? Methinks, every British Heart of Oak recoils, and every British head of the same material shakes itself, at such an avowal! Every lip that ever helped to chorus Rule Britannia, curls itself up--noses which never sniffed sea-weed tacitly snub me,--eyes which never glimpsed the ocean avert themselves in disgust. I am bespattered with salt-water oaths and tobacco-juice. The Thames Yacht Clubs, on the strength of having learned to bellow “Elm a-lee!”--“Ard-hup!” and “Oist-away!” agree to run me down. The very clerks of the Navy Pay Office propose to seize me up to the dingy fresh-water Neptune in their fore-court. Captain Basil Hall swears, on his best anchor-button, to keel-haul me daily, for six months, in “the element which never tires.” The last of the Dibdins asks for my card. Campbell flares up with the “Meteor Flag of England,” and vows to knock me down with its staff;--nay, our Sailor King himself repudiates me, as a subject, for not relishing his _High Seas_! It can’t be helped. When one is confessing, there is no place under the sun like the Ocean for “making a clean breast of it:”--and am not I here staggering and tumbling--soberly tipsy--aboard a lubberly Dutch-built hull, becalmed in a heavy swell--dreaming, when I can sleep, that I am a barrel-churn, revolving with my inside full of half-turned cream or incipient butter;--and finding, when I awake, that dreams do not go so altogether by contraries?