against their boyish frolickings, and often held forth like an oracle
concerning the vanity thereof. Indeed, at times he was wont to talk
philosophy to his ancient companions--the old sheet-anchor-men around
him--as well as to the hare-brained tenants of the fore-top, and the
giddy lads in the mizzen.

Nor was his philosophy to be despised; it abounded in wisdom. For this
Ushant was an old man, of strong natural sense, who had seen nearly the
whole terraqueous globe, and could reason of civilized and savage, of
Gentile and Jew, of Christian and Moslem. The long night-watches of the
sailor are eminently adapted to draw out the reflective faculties of
any serious-minded man, however humble or uneducated. Judge, then, what
half a century of battling out watches on the ocean must have done for
this fine old tar. He was a sort of a sea-Socrates, in his old age
"pouring out his last philosophy and life," as sweet Spenser has it;
and I never could look at him, and survey his right reverend beard,
without bestowing upon him that title which, in one of his satires,
Persius gives to the immortal quaffer of the hemlock--_Magister
Barbatus_--the bearded master.

Not a few of the ship's company had also bestowed great pains upon
their hair, which some of them--especially the genteel young sailor
bucks of the After-guard--wore over their shoulders like the ringleted
Cavaliers. Many sailors, with naturally tendril locks, prided
themselves upon what they call _love curls_, worn at the side of the
head, just before the ear--a custom peculiar to tars, and which seems
to have filled the vacated place of the old-fashioned Lord Rodney cue,
which they used to wear some fifty years ago.

But there were others of the crew labouring under the misfortune of
long, lank, Winnebago locks, carroty bunches of hair, or rebellious
bristles of a sandy hue. Ambitious of redundant mops, these still
suffered their carrots to grow, spite of all ridicule. They looked like
Huns and Scandinavians; and one of them, a young Down Easter, the
unenvied proprietor of a thick crop of inflexible yellow bamboos, went
by the name of _Peter the Wild Boy_; for, like Peter the Wild Boy in
France, it was supposed that he must have been caught like a catamount
in the pine woods of Maine. But there were many fine, flowing heads of
hair to counter-balance such sorry exhibitions as Peter's.

What with long whiskers and venerable beards, then, of every variety of
cut--Charl