their fair proportions, even so, my dear middies, does it morally prove
with some of you, who prematurely are sent off to sea.

These admonitions are solely addressed to the more diminutive class of
midshipmen--those under five feet high, and under seven stone in weight.

Truly, the records of the steerages of men-of-war are full of most
melancholy examples of early dissipation, disease, disgrace, and death.
Answer, ye shades of fine boys, who in the soils of all climes, the
round world over, far away sleep from your homes.

Mothers of men! If your hearts have been cast down when your boys have
fallen in the way of temptations ashore, how much more bursting your
grief, did you know that those boys were far from your arms, cabined
and cribbed in by all manner of iniquities. But this some of you cannot
believe. It is, perhaps, well that it is so.

But hold them fast--all those who have not yet weighed their anchors
for the Navy-round and round, hitch over hitch, bind your
leading-strings on them, and clinching a ring-bolt into your
chimmey-jam, moor your boys fast to that best of harbours, the
hearth-stone.

But if youth be giddy, old age is staid; even as young saplings, in the
litheness of their limbs, toss to their roots in the fresh morning air;
but, stiff and unyielding with age, mossy trunks never bend. With pride
and pleasure be it said, that, as for our old Commodore, though he
might treat himself to as many "_liberty days_" as he pleased, yet
throughout our stay in Rio he conducted himself with the utmost
discretion.

But he was an old, old man; physically, a very small man; his spine was
as an unloaded musket-barrel--not only attenuated, but destitute of a
solitary cartridge, and his ribs were as the ribs of a weasel.

Besides, he was Commodore of the fleet, supreme lord of the Commons in
Blue. It beseemed him, therefore, to erect himself into an ensample of
virtue, and show the gun-deck what virtue was. But alas! when Virtue
sits high aloft on a frigate's poop, when Virtue is crowned in the
cabin a Commodore, when Virtue rules by compulsion, and domineers over
Vice as a slave, then Virtue, though her mandates be outwardly
observed, bears little interior sway. To be efficacious, Virtue must
come down from aloft, even as our blessed Redeemer came down to redeem
our whole man-of-war world; to that end, mixing with its sailors and
sinners as equals.

CHAPTER LV.

MIDSHIPMEN ENTERING THE NAVY EARLY