Cockle Tom lay in harbour at Hull, after his return from the fourth Guinea voyage: his vessel was delivered of its cargo: a friend had written "home" for him,—for his father's cottage was "home" with him, even after he had married and had a little neat house in Hull. On the morrow, his young wife and himself were to have set out to see his aged parents once more, when, in the fineness of the evening, while numerous pleasure-boats were jostling each other in the narrow space of the harbour, thronged as it was with large and small craft, one boat upset, and five human lives were in danger. In a moment, Tom had plunged from the deck where he stood, and the next moment had placed two in safety in one of the boats: a second struggle, and two more were rescued; but, in attempting to save the last, the dying struggler, or the cramp, overpowered him, and he sunk to rise no more! Such was the consistent end of the life of Cockle Tom,—the "true British sailor." "A bold peasantry, their country's pride," are fast fading: may our other twin jewel in English national character—the noble sailor—ever preserve its lustre! THE LAST DAYS OF AN OLD SAILOR; OR, "BUTTER YOUR SHIRT! SING TANTARA-BOBUS, MAKE SHIFT!" Among the few survivors of our "glorious" sea-fights which the Peace sent home to Gainsbro', a busy little port on the Trent, was old Matthew Hardcastle, a veteran of threescore and ten, and something more. It was said that Matthew might have been discharged from ship-board some years earlier; but his attachment to the sea was extreme, and he was at length, to speak plainly, forced out of the navy. Gainsbro' was, at that particular period, somewhat fertile in the production of eccentric folk, for Joe Hornby was then to be seen in it, with his hat stuck full of field flowers, and sometimes, to the peril of its "crown," fixed on his head wrong side upwards, because "the world was turned upside down;" and the septuagenarian spinster, Nelly Fish, might be seen flaunting along the narrow causeway, her strange pile of five or six straw hats, which she wore one upon another, to show that "she knew all the fashions that had been, as well as those that were;"—and Martin Jackson would, ever and anon, sally forth in some odd guise that demonstrated his lunacy; for to-day he might be seen covered with papers on which were written all kinds of queer criticisms on the rulers of the day, and to-morrow he would go through the streets clad in his wife's chemise for an outer robe, and wearing an old horseman's helmet with a fox's tail for a plume, while half-a-dozen terriers yelped away at his heels, following thick and fast to the mad hunter's cries of "Yo-ho! yo-ho! Hark forward! Tantivy! Yo-ho! yo-ho!"