One mild, pleasant evening this before-the-mast autocrat and raconteur found himself the centre of an interested group on the forecastle. The midshipmen were burning for a yarn. They had learned, however, that the surest way not to have their desire gratified was to ask a sailor for a story. Certainly this was true of this particular old salt, and it was necessary to approach him by indirection. The conversation turned, as it frequently does in the forecastle, on the quarter-deck, and everywhere else, on woman. "Wot's the matter with leetle Sammy Bowline?" queried the old man in a pause in the conversation. "I seed him a-weepin' an' a-bellerin' like wot you Yankees call a 'caow' in the fust dog-watch." "A cow don't weep, Jack," answered a maintopman who had been a lumbering bucolic dairyman when the _Neversink_ left port six months since, but who was now a smart young light yardman. "Hev you seen all the cow critters on the yearth, youngster?" "No, but----" "Well, some cows weeps, I sez, an' this'n' did," answered the old sailor, sententiously. "Anyway, Sammy Bowline, he bawled awful." "I reckon he's homesick fer his ma," remarked Billy Clumpblock, the captain of the maintop. "I just guv him a few teches with me colt to take it out'n him, w'ich I've larned that w'alin' is werry good fer homesickness, an' sent him up in the top, as he calls it, to 'spell a watch.'" "It's a sing'lar thing," continued the old bo's'n's mate, "how much men an' boys thinks of feemales, sech as mothers an' sech like pussons. It stands ter reason thay ain't necessary to nobody's existence, though it's agreed that we all had 'em onct, though I've got no evidence of it in my own case 'ceptin' general report. Look at this ship, now. There ain't a woman on board of her, an' if they was, she'd be considerably disorganized, w'ich I means the ship an' p'raps the feemale too." "They seems ter be necessary on shore, though," remarked the chief quartermaster, a much-married man. "P'raps they be. But they're no 'count on sea." "I've heered them called the weaker sex," said the purser's yeoman, who was fond of literature of the dime novel variety. "I guess that's becus they can't make sailor-men out'n 'em." "Wall, naow," drawled the Jack-o'-the-dust, a studious New Englander, given to historic research as he could manage it, "there hev been wimmin sailor-men. I've read abaout 'em. There was two pyrates once an' they was wimmin. An' they was the wust kind of pyrates, too." "That's nateral," said the autocrat of the forecastle; "it stands ter reason that a woman'd be a bad sailor an' she'd also make a bad pirate." "They wus good pyrates," continued the down-easter. "Good pirates? There ain't no sech thing," chimed in another sailor, filling the responsible position of captain of the hold. "I mean they wus bludthirsty feemale villains, an' they done the pyrate bisness up jest's fine's if they'd a-bin men."