riptive coruscation, "It was covered with angels
and cherubs, and the h--l knows what else."

It would be easily possible to overdraw the personal peculiarities of
the seamen. I remember nothing corresponding at all to the
extravagances instanced in my early reading of Colburn's; such as a
frigate's watch--say one hundred and fifty men--on liberty in
Portsmouth, England, buying up all the gold-laced cocked bats in the
place, and appearing with them at the theatre. Many, however, who have
seen a homeward-bound ship leaving port, the lower rigging of her
three masts crowded with seamen from deck to top, returning roundly
the cheers given by all the ships-of-war present, foreign as well as
national, as she passes, have witnessed also the time-honored ceremony
of her crew throwing their hats overboard with the last cheer. This
corresponded to the breaking of glasses after a favorite toast, or to
the bursts of enthusiasm in a Spanish bull-ring, where Andalusian caps
fly by dozens into the arena. There, however, the bull-fighter returns
them, with many bows; but those of the homeward-bounders become the
inheritance of the boatmen of the port. The midshipman of the watch
being stationed on the forecastle, my intimates among the crew were
the staid seamen, approaching middle-age; allotted there, where they
would have least going aloft. The two captains of the forecastle--one,
I shrewdly think, Dutch, the other English, though both had English
names--would engage in conversation with me at times, mingling
deference and conscious superior experience in due proportion. One, I
remember, just before the War of Secession began, was greatly
exercised about the oncoming troubles. The causes of the difficulty
and the political complications disturbed him little; but the probable
prospect of the heads of the rebellion losing their property engrossed
his mind. He constantly returned to this; it would be confiscated,
doubtless; yet the assertion was an evident implied query to me, to
which I could give no positive answer. As is known, few of the seamen,
as of private soldiers in the army, sympathized sufficiently with the
Confederacy to join it. Indeed, the vaunt I have heard attributed to
Southern officers of the old navy, which, though never uttered in my
ears, was very consonant to the Southern spirit as I then knew it,
that Southern officers with Yankee seamen could beat the world,
testified at least to the probable attitude of the lat