nd fro, over the wet and sanded
decks; a most wearisome, dog-like, galley-slave employment. For the
byways and corners about the masts and guns, smaller stones are used,
called _prayer-books;_ inasmuch as the devout operator has to down with
them on his knees.

Finally, a grand flooding takes place, and the decks are remorselessly
thrashed with dry swabs. After which an extraordinary implement--a sort
of leathern hoe called a"_squilgee_"--is used to scrape and squeeze the
last dribblings of water from the planks. Concerning this "squilgee," I
think something of drawing up a memoir, and reading it before the
Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is a most curious affair.

By the time all these operations are concluded it is _eight bell's_,
and all hands are piped to breakfast upon the damp and every-way
disagreeable decks.

Now, against this invariable daily flooding of the three decks of a
frigate, as a man-of-war's-man, White-Jacket most earnestly protests.
In sunless weather it keeps the sailors' quarters perpetually damp; so
much so, that you can scarce sit down without running the risk of
getting the lumbago. One rheumatic old sheet-anchor-man among us was
driven to the extremity of sewing a piece of tarred canvas on the seat
of his trowsers.

Let those neat and tidy officers who so love to see a ship kept spick
and span clean; who institute vigorous search after the man who chances
to drop the crumb of a biscuit on deck, when the ship is rolling in a
sea-way; let all such swing their hammocks with the sailors; and they
would soon get sick of this daily damping of the decks.

Is a ship a wooden platter, that is to be scrubbed out every morning
before breakfast, even if the thermometer be at zero, and every sailor
goes barefooted through the flood with the chilblains? And all the
while the ship carries a doctor, well aware of Boerhaave's great maxim
"_keep the feet dry_." He has plenty of pills to give you when you are
down with a fever, the consequence of these things; but enters no
protest at the outset--as it is his duty to do--against the cause that
induces the fever.

During the pleasant night watches, the promenading officers, mounted on
their high-heeled boots, pass dry-shod, like the Israelites, over the
decks; but by daybreak the roaring tide sets back, and the poor sailors
are almost overwhelmed in it, like the Egyptians in the Red Sea.

Oh! the chills, colds, and agues that are caught. No snug stove, gr