the towns, what little
he knew of the government (I found he was no friend of Russia), his
voyages, his first arrival in America, his marriage and courtship; he
had married a country-woman of his, a dressmaker, whom he met with in
Boston. I had very little to tell him of my quiet sedentary life at
home; and in spite of our best efforts, which had protracted these yarns
through five or six watches, we fairly talked each other out, and I
turned him over to another man in the watch and put myself upon my own
resources.

I commenced a deliberate system of time-killing, which united some
profit with a cheering-up of the heavy hours. As soon as I came on deck,
and took my place and regular walk, I began with repeating over to
myself in regular order a string of matters which I had in my
memory,--the multiplication table and the table of weights and measures;
the Kanaka numerals; then the States of the Union, with their capitals;
the counties of England, with their shire towns, and the kings of
England in their order, and other things. This carried me through my
facts, and being repeated deliberately, with long intervals, often eked
out the first two bells. Then came the Ten Commandments, the
thirty-ninth chapter of Job, and a few other passages from Scripture.
The next in the order, which I seldom varied from, came Cowper's
'Castaway,' which was a great favorite with me; its solemn measure and
gloomy character, as well as the incident it was founded upon, making it
well suited to a lonely watch at sea. Then his 'Lines to Mary,' his
address to the Jackdaw, and a short extract from 'Table Talk' (I
abounded in Cowper, for I happened to have a volume of his poems in my
chest); 'Ille et nefasto' from Horace, and Goethe's 'Erl-Koenig.' After I
had got through these, I allowed myself a more general range among
everything that I could remember, both in prose and verse. In this way,
with an occasional break by relieving the wheel, heaving the log, and
going to the scuttle-butt for a drink of water, the longest watch was
passed away; and I was so regular in my silent recitations that if there
was no interruption by ship's duty I could tell very nearly the number
of bells by my progress.

Our watches below were no more varied than the watch on deck. All
washing, sewing, and reading was given up, and we did nothing but eat,
sleep, and stand our watch, leading what might be called a Cape Horn
life. The forecastle was too uncomfortable t