had missed his turn by telling this yarn. Molly Crabtree only answered with a hearty laugh, and Paul laughed too, but Matthew laughed louder and longer than either of them, for he was 'a practised laugher, and lived by it,' as he used jokingly to say. But now the fourth measure of grog was done, and it was too late to buy more; so the conversation began to grow less boisterous. Molly rose to depart; and the two veterans were left by themselves. Paul urged Matthew to get into his hammock, and Matthew urged Paul; but neither could prevail on the other, and so at last they fairly fell asleep in their chairs, and neither of them awoke,—though they each snored as loud as a rhinoceros,—until Molly Crabtree came and opened the shutters some hours after sunrise the ensuing morning. Their limbs were tolerably stiff, and their heads ached beyond a joke, it may easily be guessed, for it was many a long day since either of them had gone to sleep groggy. They made the best of their aches and pains, however, when they awoke, and, after a hearty renewed gripe of friendship, thrust each a lumping quid of tobacco into his mouth, and then quietly awaited the preparation of breakfast by Molly Crabtree. Now, as natural as our forefathers always reckoned it to be to get drunk, or, at least, tipsy, with an old friend, when you met him after a long absence or separation, yet it was always felt to be not less natural that the cosy companions of the preceding night talked like sober men the next morning. So it was with Matthew Hardcastle and Paul Perkins. "Matthew,—I've been thinking," began Paul, very measuredly, as he was sipping the cocoa-sop out of a bright brown earthen porringer, with a spoon, in imitation of his host,—"I've been thinking,—we shall soon be in our last port." "True, very true," said Matthew, "and, d'ye know, Paul? I would not much care if we had the same voyage to go again, save and except a little at the end on't." "Then we don't think alike," said Paul, dropping his spoon into the porringer, and looking thoughtful: "I'm sure, Mat, you'll bear me witness that I'm no skinkerly coward; but, splice me, if I don't think that all this warring and fighting, and blowing up of poor men's limbs is, after all, a great piece of wickedness. And, besides that, I've thought very much of late,—and particularly since I've seen the times change so much,—that this setting of poor Englishmen on to fight poor foreigners, and poor foreigners to fight poor Englishmen, is only a deep scheme, on the part of the rich abroad and the rich at home, to keep the poor down." "Say you so, Paul?" exclaimed Matthew, also resting his spoon on the brim of the porringer, and looking very intently upon his friend; "why, you know, Paul, if we had not gone to fight the foreigners, they would have come to fight us."