buried itself in the muscle of the arm, just below the skin, where it stood out, as if it had been a sloe, both in shape and colour. The collar-bone was much shattered, and my chest was a good deal shaken, and greatly bruised; but I had perceived nothing of all this at the time I was shot; the sole perceptible sensation was the feeling of cold water running down, and the pinch in the shoulder, as already described. I was much surprised (every man who has been seriously hit being entitled to expatiate) with the extreme smallness of the puncture in the skin through which the ball had entered; you could not have forced a pea through it, and there was scarcely any flow of blood.

"A very simple affair this, sir," said the surgeon, as he made a minute incision right over the ball.

IV

Tom Cringle's Log.

COMMODORE SIR OLIVER OAKPLANK AND LIEUTENANT DAVID SPRAWL

THE Commodore was a red-faced little man, with a very irritable cast of countenance, which, however, was by no means a true index to his warm heart, for I verily believe that no commander was ever more beloved by officers and men than he was. He had seen a great deal of service, and had been several times wounded. He was a wag in his way, and the officer now perambulating the deck alongside of him was an unfailing source of mirth; although the Commodore never passed the limits of strict naval etiquette, or the bounds of perfect good breeding in his fun. The gallant old fellow was dressed in faded nankeen trousers, discoloured cotton stockings, shoes with corn-holes cut in the toes, an ill-washed and rumpled white

Marseilles waistcoat, an old blue uniform coat, worn absolutely threadbare, and white and soapy at the seams and elbows; each shoulder being garnished with a faded gold-lace strap, to confine the epaulets when mounted, and that was only on a Sunday. His silk neckcloth had been most probably black once, but now it was a dingy brown; and he wore a most shocking bad hat-an old white beaver, with very broad brims, the snout of it fastened back to the crown with a lanyard of common spunyarn, buttoned up, as it were, like the chapeaux in Charles the Second's time, to prevent it flapping down over his eyes. He walked backwards and forwards very quickly, taking two steps for Sprawl's one, and whenever he turned he gave a loud stamp, and swung briskly about as if he had been on a pivot.

Lieutenant Sprawl, the officer with whom he was walking and keeping up an animated conversation, was also in no small degree remarkable in his externals, but in a totally different line. He was a tall man, at the very least six feet high, and stout in proportion; very squareshouldered; but, large as he was, his coat seemed to have been made to fit even a stouter person, for the shoulderstraps projected considerably beyond his shoulders, like the projecting eaves of a Swiss cottage, thus giving the upper part of his figure a sharp ungainly appearance. Below these wide-spreading upperworks he tapered away to nothing at the loins, and over the hips he was not the girth of a growing lad. His legs, from the knee down, were the longest I ever saw in man, reversing all one's notions of proportion or symmetry, for they gradually swelled out from the knee, until they ended in the ankle, which emulated, if it did not altogether surpass, the calf in diameter. His head was very large, and thatched with a great fell of coarse red hair, hanging down in greasy masses on each side of his pale freckled visage, until it

blended into two immense whiskers, which he cultivated under his chin with such care, that he appeared to be peeping through a fur collar, like a Madagascar ourangoutang. His eyes were large, prominent, and of a faded blue, like those of a dead fish; his general loveliness being diversified by a very noticeable squint. But his lovely mouth, who shall describe it? Lips he had none; and the first impression on one's mind when you saw him naturally led one to exclaim, "Bless me-what an oddity! The man has no mouth"-until he did make play with his potato-trap, and then to be sure it was like a gap suddenly split open in a piece of mottled freestone. It was altogether so much out of its latitude, that when he spoke it seemed aside, as the players say; and when he drank his wine, he looked for all the world as if he had been pouring it into his ear.

He wore a curious wee hat, with scarcely any brim, the remains of the nap bleached by a burning sun, and splashed and matted together from the pelting of numberless showers and the washing up of many a salt-sea spray, but carefully garnished, nevertheless, with a double stripe of fresh gold-lace, and a naval button on the left side. Add to this, an old-fashioned uniform coat, very far through, as we say; long-waisted, with remarkably short skirts, but the strap for the epaulet new and bright as the loop on the hat. Now, then, swathe him in a dingy white kerseymere waistcoat, over which dangles a great horn eye-glass, suspended by a magnificent new broad watered black ribbon; and, finally, take the trouble to shroud the lower limbs of the Apollo in ancient duck trousers, extending about half-way down the calf of the leg, if calf he had; leaving his pillar-like ankles conspicuously observable; and you will have a tolerably accurate idea of the presence and bearing of our amiable and accomplished shipmate, Mr. David Sprawl.

Yet he was a most excellent warm-hearted person at bottom; straightforward and kind to the men; never blazoning or amplifying their faults, but generally, on the other hand, softening them; and often astonishing the poor fellows by his out-of-the-way and unexpected kindness and civility. Indeed, he plumed himself on the general polish of his manners, whether to equals or inferiors, and the "Gazelles" repaid the compliment by christening him, at one time, "Old B- Politeful,” and "Davie Doublepipe" at another, from a peculiarity that we shall presently describe.

You must know, therefore, that this remarkable personage was possessed of a very uncommon accomplishment, being neither more nor less than a natural ventriloquist. For he had two distinct voices, as if he had been a sort of living double flageolet; one a falsetto, small and liquid, and clear as the note of an octave flute; the other sonorous and rough as the groaning of a trombone. In conversation, the alternations, apparently involuntary, were so startling and abrupt, that they sounded as if ever and anon the keys of the high and low notes of an organ had been alternately struck; so instantaneously were the small notes snapped off into the lower ones, and vice versa-so that a stranger would, in all probability, have concluded, had he not known the peculiarities of the Adonis, that a little midshipman was at one moment squeaking up the main-hatchway from the hold, and at the next answered by a boatswain's mate on deck. Indeed, while the Commodore and his subaltern pursued their rapid walk, backwards and forwards, on the quarter-deck, the fine, manly, sailor-like voice of the old man, as it intertwined with the octave-flute note and the grumbling bass of David Sprawl, like a three-strand rope of gold thread, silver thread, and tarry spunyarn, might have given cause to believe that the two were

accompanied in their perambulations by some invisible familiar, who chose to take part in the conversation, and to denote his presence through the ear, while to the eye he was but thin air.

Thus beloved by the men, to his brother-officers he was the most obliging and accommodating creature that ever was invented. Numberless were the petty feuds which he soldered, that, but for his warm-hearted intervention, might have eventuated in pistol-shots and gunpowder; and the mids of the ship actually adored him. If leave to go on shore, or any little immunity was desired by them, "Old B- Politeful" was the channel through which their requests ran; and if any bother was to be eschewed, or any little fault sheltered, or any sternness on the part of the Commodore or any of the lieutenants to be mollified-in fine, if any propitiation of the higher powers was required, who interceded but "Davie Doublepipe"?

The Cruise of the Midge.

THOMAS CARLYLE

1795-1881

I

NAVAL OCCASIONS

OBSERVE, however, beyond the Atlantic, has not the new day verily dawned! Democracy, as we said, is born; storm-girt, is struggling for life and victory. A sympathetic France rejoices over the Rights of Man; in all saloons, it is said "What a spectacle!" Now too behold our Deane, our Franklin, American Plenipotentiaries, here in person soliciting: the sons of the Saxon Puritans, with