een, wherein you
can turn over and over--lay on this side or that; on your back, if you
please; stretch out your legs; in short, take your ease in your
hammock; for of all inns, your bed is the best.

But when, with five hundred other hammocks, yours is crowded and jammed
on all sides, on a frigate berth-deck; the third from above, when
"_spreaders_" are prohibited by an express edict from the Captain's
cabin; and every man about you is jealously watchful of the rights and
privileges of his own proper hammock, as settled by law and usage;
_then_ your hammock is your Bastile and canvas jug; into which, or out
of which, it is very hard to get; and where sleep is but a mockery and
a name.

Eighteen inches a man is all they allow you; eighteen inches in width;
in _that_ you must swing. Dreadful! they give you more swing than that
at the gallows.

During warm nights in the Tropics, your hammock is as a stew-pan; where
you stew and stew, till you can almost hear yourself hiss. Vain are all
stratagems to widen your accommodations. Let them catch you insinuating
your boots or other articles in the head of your hammock, by way of a
"spreader." Near and far, the whole rank and file of the row to which
you belong feel the encroachment in an instant, and are clamorous till
the guilty one is found out, and his pallet brought back to its
bearings.

In platoons and squadrons, they all lie on a level; their hammock
_clews_ crossing and recrossing in all directions, so as to present one
vast field-bed, midway between the ceiling and the floor; which are
about five feet asunder.

One extremely warm night, during a calm, when it was so hot that only a
skeleton could keep cool (from the free current of air through its
bones), after being drenched in my own perspiration, I managed to wedge
myself out of my hammock; and with what little strength I had left,
lowered myself gently to the deck. Let me see now, thought I, whether
my ingenuity cannot devise some method whereby I can have room to
breathe and sleep at the same time. I have it. I will lower my hammock
underneath all these others; and then--upon that separate and
independent level, at least--I shall have the whole berth-deck to
myself. Accordingly, I lowered away my pallet to the desired
point--about three inches from the floor--and crawled into it again.

But, alas! this arrangement made such a sweeping semi-circle of my
hammock, that, while my head and feet were at par, the