d, as
for drinking, you should only have seen him pour out a tumbler of
bottled stout, for which he had an inordinate relish, and tossing it
down his throat, give a sigh of the deepest satisfaction when he had
finished it, when, replacing his glass on the table, he would lean back
in his chair as if overcome by the exertion.

Before he had been clothed in sailor fashion, Jocko used to be very fond
of skylarking with the men forward, stealing their mess utensils and
scampering up and down the rigging to evade pursuit when his
mischievousness had been found out; but, after that period, he seemed to
become possessed of a wonderful amount of dignity which made him give up
his wild frolicsomeness, and leave off his previous habits, for he never
went to the forecastle again, but restricted himself to the officers'
quarters aft. This he did, too, in spite of the coaxings of the crew,
who were very fond of him, and the fact of Tom often kicking him out of
his cabin, where he would take possession of his sofa whenever he had
the chance, wrapping himself in Tom's boat-cloak and reclining
gracefully on the cushions. One of Jocko's chief amusements also was in
watching the machinery when in motion; and he would spend hours in
looking down at it through the engine-room hatch.

Once, when the skylight was up, he had a narrow squeak for his life;
for, carried away by his excitement, in trying to put his hands--paws I
should say--on the revolving shaft, he tumbled through; and, but for the
chief engineer seeing him in time and stopping the engines, which were
just then going slow, poor Jocko would have come to grief.

This accident, however, never broke him of the habit of inspecting the
machinery. It had a sort of weird attraction for him which he could not
resist. Possibly, he might have been a sort of incubating Watt or
Brunel, who knows? But, alas, he never became sufficiently developed or
"evolved" from his quadrumanous condition to answer the question in
person, as the engines which were his hobby in the end compassed his
untimely death!

Those paddle-wheel steamers that were built for the navy some forty
years ago, although designed for capturing Cuban slavers, were certainly
not remarkable for their speed, and the _Porpoise_ was no exception to
her class; so, what with her naturally slow rate of progression through
the water, and the strict Admiralty circular limiting the consumption of
coal even on special service lik