as not the
less utterly solemn and serious beyond all attempts at imitation or
description.

The younger seaman was, in all outward appearance, the converse of his
companion. His stature could not have exceeded four feet. A pair
of stumpy bow-legs supported his squat, unwieldy figure, while his
unusually short and thick arms, with no ordinary fists at their
extremities, swung off dangling from his sides like the fins of a
sea-turtle. Small eyes, of no particular color, twinkled far back in his
head. His nose remained buried in the mass of flesh which enveloped his
round, full, and purple face; and his thick upper-lip rested upon the
still thicker one beneath with an air of complacent self-satisfaction,
much heightened by the owner's habit of licking them at intervals.
He evidently regarded his tall shipmate with a feeling half-wondrous,
half-quizzical; and stared up occasionally in his face as the red
setting sun stares up at the crags of Ben Nevis.

Various and eventful, however, had been the peregrinations of the worthy
couple in and about the different tap-houses of the neighbourhood during
the earlier hours of the night. Funds even the most ample, are not
always everlasting: and it was with empty pockets our friends had
ventured upon the present hostelrie.

At the precise period, then, when this history properly commences, Legs,
and his fellow Hugh Tarpaulin, sat, each with both elbows resting upon
the large oaken table in the middle of the floor, and with a hand upon
either cheek. They were eyeing, from behind a huge flagon of unpaid-for
"humming-stuff," the portentous words, "No Chalk," which to their
indignation and astonishment were scored over the doorway by means of
that very mineral whose presence they purported to deny. Not that the
gift of decyphering written characters--a gift among the commonalty
of that day considered little less cabalistical than the art of
inditing--could, in strict justice, have been laid to the charge of
either disciple of the sea; but there was, to say the truth, a certain
twist in the formation of the letters--an indescribable lee-lurch about
the whole---which foreboded, in the opinion of both seamen, a long run
of dirty weather; and determined them at once, in the allegorical words
of Legs himself, to "pump ship, clew up all sail, and scud before the
wind."

Having accordingly disposed of what remained of the ale, and looped up
the points of their short doublets, they finally