ktails, letting
fall therein a small drop of tar, like a bit of brown toast, by way of
imparting a flavour. Of course, the thing was managed with the utmost
secrecy; and as a whole dark night elapsed after their orgies, the
revellers were, in a good measure, secure from detection; and those who
indulged too freely had twelve long hours to get sober before daylight
obtruded.

Next day, fore and aft, the whole frigate smelled like a lady's toilet;
the very tar-buckets were fragrant; and from the mouth of many a grim,
grizzled old quarter-gunner came the most fragrant of breaths. The
amazed Lieutenants went about snuffing up the gale; and, for once.
Selvagee had no further need to flourish his perfumed hand-kerchief. It
was as if we were sailing by some odoriferous shore, in the vernal
season of violets. Sabaean odours!

"For many a league,
Cheered with grateful smell, old Ocean smiled."

But, alas! all this perfume could not be wasted for nothing; and the
masters-at-arms and ship's corporals, putting this and that together,
very soon burrowed into the secret. The purser's steward was called to
account, and no more lavender punches and Cologne toddies were drank on
board the Neversink.

CHAPTER XV.

A SALT-JUNK CLUB IN A MAN-OF-WAR, WITH A NOTICE TO QUIT.

It was about the period of the Cologne-water excitement that my
self-conceit was not a little wounded, and my sense of delicacy
altogether shocked, by a polite hint received from the cook of the mess
to which I happened to belong. To understand the matter, it is needful
to enter into preliminaries.

The common seamen in a large frigate are divided into some thirty or
forty messes, put down on the purser's books as _Mess_ No. 1, _Mess_
No. 2, _Mess_ No. 3, etc. The members of each mess club, their rations
of provisions, and breakfast, dine, and sup together in allotted
intervals between the guns on the main-deck. In undeviating rotation,
the members of each mess (excepting the petty-officers) take their turn
in performing the functions of cook and steward. And for the time
being, all the affairs of the club are subject to their inspection and
control.

It is the cook's business, also, to have an eye to the general
interests of his mess; to see that, when the aggregated allowances of
beef, bread, etc., are served out by one of the master's mates, the
mess over which he presides receives its full share, without stint