ton, who had been a hairdresser and proved
unfortunate as a gold-digger in Australia; there was James Lussoni, an
Italian, who claimed to be a descendant of the old Genoese merchants;
and there was John Jones, a runaway man-of-warsman, pretty nearly worn
out, and subject to apoplexy.

Four sailors and three apprentices make seven men, a cook and a boy
are nine, and a mate and a captain make eleven; and eleven of a crew
were we, all told, men and boy, aboard the three-masted schooner
_Lightning_ when we sailed away one April morning out of the river
Mersey, bound to Boston, North America.

My name was then as it still is--for during the many years I have used
the sea, never had I occasion to ship with a "purser's name"--my name,
I say, is David Kerry, and in that year of God 1855 I was a strapping
young fellow, seventeen years old, making a second voyage with Captain
Funnel, having been bound apprentice to that most excellent but
long-departed mariner by my parents, who, finding me resolved to go to
sea had determined that my probation should be thorough: no half-laughs
and pursers' grins would satisfy them; my arm was to plunge deep into
the tar bucket straight away; and certainly there was no man then
hailing from the port of Liverpool better able to qualify a young chap
for the profession of the sea--but a young chap, mind you, who liked
his calling, who _meant_ to be a man and not a "sojer" in it--than
Captain Funnel of the schooner _Lightning_.

The four sailors slept in a bit of a forecastle forward; we three
apprentices slung our hammocks in a bulkheaded part of the run or
steerage, a gloomy hole, the obscurity of which was defined rather
than illuminated by the dim twilight sifting down aslant from the
hatch. Here we stowed our chests, and here we took our meals, and here
we slept and smoked and yarned in our watch below. I very well
remember my two fellow apprentices. One was named Corbin, and the
other Halsted. They were both of them smart, honest, bright lads,
coming well equipped and well educated from respectable homes, in love
with the calling of the sea, and resolved in time not only to command
ships, but to own them.

Well, nothing in any way noteworthy happened for many days. Though the
schooner was called the _Lightning_, she was by no means a clipper.
She was built on lines which were fashionable forty years before, when
the shipwright held that a ship's stability must be risked if she was
one inc