lly testing their honesty, they were
interrogated concerning the day on which they had signed--whether it
was _Banyan Day_, or _Duff Day_, or _Swampseed Day_; for among the
sailors on board a man-of-war, the land terms, _Monday_, _Tuesday_,
_Wednesday_, are almost unknown. In place of these they substitute
nautical names, some of which are significant of the daily bill of fare
at dinner for the week.

The two witnesses were somewhat puzzled by the attorney-like questions
of the Purser, till a third party came along, one of the ship's
barbers, and declared, of his own knowledge, that Shenly executed the
instrument on a _Shaving Day_; for the deceased seaman had informed him
of the circumstance, when he came to have his beard reaped on the
morning of the event.

In the Purser's opinion, this settled the question; and it is to be
hoped that the widow duly received her husband's death-earned wages.

Shenly was dead and gone; and what was Shenly's epitaph?

--"D. D."--

opposite his name in the Purser's books, in "_Black's best Writing
Fluid_"--funereal name and funereal hue--meaning "Discharged, Dead."

CHAPTER LXXXIII.

A MAN-OF-WAR COLLEGE.

In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death goes
overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, curses mix with
tears; and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the shrill octave
of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their own. Checkers were
played in the waist at the time of Shenly's burial; and as the body
plunged, a player swept the board. The bubbles had hardly burst, when
all hands were _piped down_ by the Boatswain, and the old jests were
heard again, as if Shenly himself were there to hear.

This man-of-war life has not left me unhardened. I cannot stop to weep
over Shenly now; that would be false to the life I depict; wearing no
mourning weeds, I resume the task of portraying our man-of-war world.

Among the various other vocations, all driven abreast on board of the
Neversink, was that of the schoolmaster. There were two academies in
the frigate. One comprised the apprentice boys, who, upon certain days
of the week, were indoctrinated in the mysteries of the primer by an
invalid corporal of marines, a slender, wizzen-cheeked man, who had
received a liberal infant-school education.

The other school was a far more pretentious affair--a sort of army and
navy seminary combined, where mystical mathematical problems w