n bestow with any chance of profit. Which of these
courses is the worst, I really cannot say. If Sunday be made a working
day, and no attention is paid to its appropriate duties, the crew are
by no means satisfied, and but too readily contract, by degrees, the
habit of neglecting their obligations both to God and man. On the
contrary, if the day be entirely taken up with devotional exercises,
to the fatigue of their minds and bodies, they are exceedingly apt,
after a time, to vote the "whole concern," as they call it, a bore,
and to make up for this forced attention by the most scandalous
indecencies, when out of sight of their "psalm-singing captain."

I would accordingly recommend every officer in command of a ship to
bring as many of the arrangements of his Sunday as possible into a
jog-trot order, not to be departed from unless there should arise an
absolute necessity for such deviation. Nineteen Sundays might, indeed,
pass over without any apparent advantage being gained from this
uniformity, but on the twentieth some opportunity might occur, of
infinite value to all concerned, which opportunity might, in all
probability, prove unavailing but for the previous preparation. To
borrow a professional illustration of the most familiar kind; it may
be asked, how many hundred times do we exercise the great guns and
small arms, for once that we fire them in real action? And why should
it be supposed that, for the useful application of our mental
energies to the most important of all warfare, habitual training is
less necessary?

Without going needlessly deep into these speculations, I may observe
that, even in the least regularly disciplined ships, there is now a
marked difference between Sunday and any other day in the week.
Although the grand object seems to be to have everything as clean as
possible, and in its most apple-pie order, great part of the labour
employed to produce this result is over before Sunday arrives. The
decks, for instance, receive such a thorough allowance of holy-stoning
and scrubbing on Saturday, that a mere washing, with perhaps a slight
touch of the brushes and sand, brings them into the milk-white
condition which is the delight of every genuine first lieutenant's
heart. All this is got over early in the morning, in order that the
decks may be swabbed up and the ropes nicely flemished down before
seven bells, at which time it is generally thought expedient to go to
breakfast, though half-an-ho