equently
detected.

Precisely the same "dull round" of vice is trodden, at least once a
week, by the same class of young men. The merchants' clerks are
certainly creatures of no imagination, or they would have struck out
some new way of going to the devil; they evidently have not a spark of
what an eminent Irish lawyer called "the poetry of wickedness;" they
uniformly begin with plundering the money drawer, and end with forging
checks.

Mr. Longford was advised of his son's guilt, and the affair was
compromised by his paying the amount purloined. In utter despair the
afflicted father placed his degenerate son on board an outward-bound
Indiaman, a mode of proceeding often resorted to prematurely, for it
generally does a boy's business if he is viciously inclined--a
merchantman's forecastle is not a school of morality. Sending a
refractory child to sea may be an excellent way of getting rid of him,
but it is at the same time the most expeditious mode of sending him to
the devil.

There is a great deal of talk about "godly captains;" but I never knew
one that was not an infernal tyrant, and a most accomplished scoundrel.
If you wish to cure a boy of a fondness for the sea, send him a good
long voyage with a godly captain, and I'll be bail that he comes home
as lean as a weazel, and most thoroughly disgusted at the very thoughts
of a ship. If you merely wish to get rid of him, send him to the coast
of Guinea on a trading voyage, or to that Golgotha, New Orleans; a godly
captain, by working him one half to death, and starving him the other,
will put it out of his power to trouble you any more in this world. The
Carmelites and other religious orders were once of opinion that the
devil could be flogged out of the flesh, and for that purpose wore a
couple of fathoms of two-inch rope about their loins: godly captains
think he can be worked out, and so, perhaps, he can; but generally, in
the two places that I have mentioned, he and the vital spark go out
together.

I do not know whether I ought to regard it as a fortunate or unfortunate
circumstance, that the first captain that I sailed with was a "ripper"
for swearing and drinking. He was a professed infidel, a first-rate
seaman, an excellent scholar, and took more care of the morals of his
crew than many of those who have prayers twice a day; and ten thousand
times more of their health, for he would not permit a man to expose
himself for two minutes to the sun or rain in