of a
sociable chat. Not the Thirty Tyrants even--the clubbed post-captains
of old Athens--could stop the wagging tongues at the street-corners.
For chat man must; and by our immortal Bill of Rights, that guarantees
to us liberty of speech, chat we Yankees will, whether on board a
frigate, or on board our own terra-firma plantations.

In men-of-war, the Galley, or Cookery, on the gun-deck, is the grand
centre of gossip and news among the sailors. Here crowds assemble to
chat away the half-hour elapsing after every meal. The reason why this
place and these hours are selected rather than others is this: in the
neighbourhood of the galley alone, and only after meals, is the
man-of-war's-man permitted to regale himself with a smoke.

A sumptuary edict, truly, that deprived White-Jacket, for one, of a
luxury to which he had long been attached. For how can the mystical
motives, the capricious impulses of a luxurious smoker go and come at
the beck of a Commodore's command? No! when I smoke, be it because of
my sovereign good pleasure I choose so to do, though at so unseasonable
an hour that I send round the town for a brasier of coals. What! smoke
by a sun-dial? Smoke on compulsion? Make a trade, a business, a vile
recurring calling of smoking? And, perhaps, when those sedative fumes
have steeped you in the grandest of reveries, and, circle over circle,
solemnly rises some immeasurable dome in your soul--far away, swelling
and heaving into the vapour you raise--as if from one Mozart's grandest
marches of a temple were rising, like Venus from the sea--at such a
time, to have your whole Parthenon tumbled about your ears by the knell
of the ship's bell announcing the expiration of the half-hour for
smoking! Whip me, ye Furies! toast me in saltpetre! smite me, some
thunderbolt! charge upon me, endless squadrons of Mamalukes! devour me,
Feejees! but preserve me from a tyranny like this!

No! though I smoked like an Indian summer ere I entered the Neversink,
so abhorrent was this sumptuary law that I altogether abandoned the
luxury rather than enslave it to a time and a place. Herein did I not
right, Ancient and Honourable Old Guard of Smokers all round the world?

But there were others of the crew not so fastidious as myself. After
every meal, they hied to the galley and solaced their souls with a
whiff.

Now a bunch of cigars, all banded together, is a type and a symbol of
the brotherly love between smokers. Likewise, for the