UL LINGUIST--I STUDY ARABIC--MY FIRST VOYAGE TO SEA--WE SAIL
FOR THE COAST OF AFRICA--THE BRIG CAPSIZED--SAVED ON A RAFT.

"Never throw away a piece of string, a screw, or a nail, or neglect an
opportunity, when it offers, of gaining knowledge or learning how to do
a thing," my father used to say; and as I respected him, I followed his
advice,--and have, through life, on many occasions had reason to be
thankful that I did so.

In the town near which we resided lived a tailor, Andrew Spurling by
name. He was a remarkable man, though a mere botcher at his trade; for
he could never manage to make his customers' clothes fit their bodies.
For fat men he invariably made tight coats, and for thin people loose
ones. Few, therefore, except those who were indifferent on that point,
went a second time to him for new ones. He repaired clothes, however,
to perfection, and never refused to attempt renovating the most
threadbare or tattered of garments. He had evidently mistaken his
vocation; or rather, his friends had committed a great error when they
made him a tailor. Yet perhaps he succeeded as well in it as he would
have done at any handicraft. He possessed, in fact, a mind which might
have raised him to a respectable, if not a high position, in the walks
of literature or science. As it was, however, it was concentrated on
one object--the acquisition of languages. Andrew had been sent to the
grammar-school in our town, where he gained the rudiments of education,
and a certain amount of Latin and Greek; and where he might, possibly,
have become well-educated, had he not--his father dying insolvent--been
taken from school, and, much to his grief, apprenticed to the trade he
was now following.

Instead of perfecting himself in the languages of which he already knew
a little, and without a friend to guide him,--having saved up money
enough to buy a grammar and dictionary,--he commenced the study of
another; after mastering the chief difficulties of which he began still
another; and so he had gone on through life, with the most determined
perseverance, gaining even more than a smattering of the tongues not
only of Europe but of the Eastern world, though he could make no
practical use of his acquisitions.

Apparently slight circumstances produce important results. Coming out
of school one day, and while playing, as usual, in our somewhat rough
fashion, my class-mate, Richard Halliday, tore my jacket from the collar
downwar