The seamen of the fifties and sixties were grievously superstitious. They viewed sailing on a Friday with undisguised displeasure; and attributed many of their disasters when on a voyage to this unholy act. I have known men leave their vessel rather than sail on a Friday. The owner of a vessel who did not regard this as a part of the orthodox faith was voted outside the pale of compassion. Then it was a great breach of nautical morals to whistle when the wind was howling, and singing in such circumstances was promptly prohibited. If perchance bad weather was encountered immediately after leaving port, and it was continuous, the forecastle became the centre of righteous discussion and intrigue, in order that the reason for this might be arrived at, and due punishment inflicted on the culprit who was found to be the cause of all their sorrows. They would look upon gales and mishaps, no matter how unimportant, as tokens of Divine wrath sent as a punishment for the sin of some one of them not having, for example, paid a debt of honour before sailing. The guilty person or persons were soon identified, even if they attempted to join in the secret investigation, and the penalty of being ostracised was rigidly enforced. It was a hard fate, which sometimes continued the whole voyage, especially if no redeeming features presented themselves. The sailor's calling makes superstition a part of his nature. The weird moaning of the wind suggests to him at times saintly messages from afar; and he is easily lost in reverie. He holds sweet converse with souls that have long since passed into another sphere, but the hallucinary charm causes him to fix his faith in the belief that they are hovering about him, so that he may convey to them some message to transmit to those friends or relatives who are the objects of his devout veneration. Yet he ceases to be a sentimentalist when duty calls him to face the realities of life. An order to shorten sail transforms him at once into another being. He usually swears with refined eloquence on unexpected occasions, when a sudden order draws him from visionary meditation. Dreams, which may be the creation of indigestible junk--that is, salt beef which may have been round the Horn a few times--are realities: privileged communications from a mystic source. There is great vying with each other in the relation of some grotesque nightmare fancy, which may have lasted the twentieth part of a second, but which takes perhaps a quarter of an hour to repeat; traverses vast space in a progression of hideous tragedy and calamitous shipwreck; and is served up with increased profusion of detail when the history of the passage is manuscripted to their homes and to their lovers. Here is an instance of this mania in an unusually exaggerated form. For obvious reasons it is undesirable that the name of the vessel, or the captain, should be mentioned here. The captain had a dream, or, as he stated, a vision, when off