of that engagement. And his whole appearance
evinced that Captain Claret himself had fought many Brandywine battles
ashore in honour of his sire's memory, and commanded in many bloodless
Brandywine actions at sea.

It was therefore with some savour of provocation that the sailors held
forth on the ungenerous conduct of Captain Claret, in stepping in
between them and Providence, as it were, which by this lucky windfall,
they held, seemed bent upon relieving their necessities; while Captain
Claret himself, with an inexhaustible cellar, emptied his Madeira
decanters at his leisure.

But next day all hands were electrified by the old familiar sound--so
long hushed--of the drum rolling to grog.

After that the port was served out twice a day, till all was expended.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE CHAPLAIN AND CHAPEL IN A MAN-OF-WAR.

The next day was Sunday; a fact set down in the almanac, spite of
merchant seamen's maxim, that _there are no Sundays of soundings_.

_No Sundays off soundings, _indeed! No Sundays on shipboard! You may as
well say there should be no Sundays in churches; for is not a ship
modeled after a church? has it not three spires--three steeples? yea,
and on the gun-deck, a bell and a belfry? And does not that bell
merrily peal every Sunday morning, to summon the crew to devotions?

At any rate, there were Sundays on board this particular frigate of
ours, and a clergyman also. He was a slender, middle-aged man, of an
amiable deportment and irreproachable conversation; but I must say,
that his sermons were but ill calculated to benefit the crew. He had
drank at the mystic fountain of Plato; his head had been turned by the
Germans; and this I will say, that White-Jacket himself saw him with
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria in his hand.

Fancy, now, this transcendental divine standing behind a gun-carriage
on the main-deck, and addressing five hundred salt-sea sinners upon the
psychological phenomena of the soul, and the ontological necessity of
every sailor's saving it at all hazards. He enlarged upon the follies
of the ancient philosophers; learnedly alluded to the Phiedon of Plato;
exposed the follies of Simplicius's Commentary on Aristotle's "De
Coelo," by arraying against that clever Pagan author the admired tract
of Tertullian--_De Prascriptionibus Haereticorum_--and concluded by a
Sanscrit invocation. He was particularly hard upon the Gnostics and
Marcionites of the second century of the Chris