which was our station, their news
was stale, and we got the bottom tier of fresh beef. The ship to which
I there belonged was a small steam-corvette, which with two gunboats
constituted all the social possibilities. Happily for myself, I did
not join till midway in the corvette's stay off the port, which lasted
in all nearly six months, before she was recalled in mercy to New
Orleans. I have never seen a body of intelligent men reduced so nearly
to imbecility as my shipmates then were.

One of my captains used to adduce, as his conception of the extreme of
isolation, to be the keeper of a lightship off Cape Horn; a
professional conceit rivalling the elder Mr. Weller's equally profound
recognition of the connection between keeping a pike and misanthropy.
We off Sabine Pass were banished about equally with the keeper of a
turnpike or of a remote lightship. We ought, of course, to have
improved the leisure which weighed so heavily on our hands; but the
improvement of idle moments is an accomplishment of itself, as many a
retired business man has found out too late. There is an impression,
derived from the experience of passengers on board ocean steamers,
that naval officers have an abundance of spare time. The ship, it
seems assumed, runs itself; the officers have only to look on and
enjoy. As a matter of fact, sea officers under normal conditions are
as busy as the busiest house-keeper, with the care to boot of two,
three, four, or five hundred children, to be kept continually doing as
they should; the old woman who lived in the shoe had a good thing in
comparison. Thus occupied, the leisure habit of self-improvement,
other than in the practice of the calling, is not formed. At sea, on a
voyage, the vicissitudes of successive days provide the desultory
succession of incidents, which vary and fill out the tenor of
occupations, keeping life full and interesting. In port, besides the
regular and fairly engrossing routine, there are the resources of the
shore to fill up the chinks. But the dead monotony of the blockade was
neither sea nor port. It supplied nothing. The crew, once drilled,
needed but a few moments each day to keep at the level of proficiency;
and there was practically nothing to do, because nothing happened that
required either a doing or an undoing.

Under such conditions even a gale of wind was a not unwelcome change.
Although little activity was required to meet it, it at least
presented new surroundings