eason against their junction, and yet in this instance they fall
suspiciously on our ear. We are similarly impressed by the dedication.
Of the existence of Uncle Gansevoort, of Gansevoort, Saratoga County, we
are wholly incredulous. We shall commission our New York correspondents
to inquire as to the reality of Mr Melville's avuncular relative, and,
until certified of his corporality, shall set down the gentleman with
the Dutch patronymic as a member of an imaginary clan.

Although glad to escape from Nukuheva, where he had been held in a sort
of honourable captivity, Typee--the _alias_ bestowed upon the rover by
his new shipmates, after the valley whence they rescued him--was but
indifferently pleased with the vessel on which he left it, and whose
articles he signed as a seaman for one cruise. The Julia was of a
beautiful model, and on or before a wind she sailed like a witch; but
that was all that could be said in her praise. She was rotten to the
core, incommodious, and ill-provided, badly manned, and worse commanded.
American-built, she dated from the Short war, had served as a privateer,
been taken by the British, passed through many vicissitudes, and was in
no condition for a long cruise in the Pacific. So mouldering was her
fabric, that the reckless sailors, when seated in the forecastle, dug
their knives into the dank boards between them and eternity as easily as
into the moist sides of some old pollard oak. She was much dilapidated
and rapidly becoming more so; for Black Baltimore, the ship's cook, when
in want of firewood, did not scruple to hack splinters from the bits and
beams. Lugubrious indeed was the aspect of the forecastle. Landsmen,
whose ideas of a sailor's sleeping-place are taken from the snow-white
hammocks and exquisitely clean berth-deck of a man of war, or from the
rough, but substantial comfort of a well-appointed merchantman, can form
no conception of the surpassing and countless abominations of a
South-Sea whaler. The "Little Jule," as her crew affectionately styled
her, was a craft of two hundred tons or thereabouts; she had sailed with
thirty-two hands, whom desertion had reduced to twenty, but these were
too many for the cramped and putrid nook in which they slept, ate, and
smoked, and alternately desponded or were jovial, as sickness and
discomfort, or a Saturday night's bottle and hopes of better luck, got
the upper hand. Want of room, however, was one of the least grievances
of which th