too near and constant to favor deceit. You
wear your character as loosely as your flowing trowsers. Vain
all endeavors to assume qualities not yours; or to conceal those you
possess. Incognitos, however desirable, are out of the question. And
thus aboard of all ships in which I have sailed, I have invariably
been known by a sort of thawing-room title. Not,--let me hurry to
say,--that I put hand in tar bucket with a squeamish air, or ascended
the rigging with a Chesterfieldian mince. No, no, I was never better
than my vocation; and mine have been many. I showed as brown a chest,
and as hard a hand, as the tarriest tar of them all. And never did
shipmate of mine upbraid me with a genteel disinclination to duty,
though it carried me to truck of main-mast, or jib-boom-end, in the
most wolfish blast that ever howled.

Whence then, this annoying appellation? for annoying it most
assuredly was. It was because of something in me that could not be
hidden; stealing out in an occasional polysyllable; an otherwise
incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote, unguarded allusions
to Belles-Lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous to mention.

But suffice it to say, that it had gone abroad among the Areturion's
crew, that at some indefinite period of my career, I had been a
"nob." But Jarl seemed to go further. He must have taken me for one
of the House of Hanover in disguise; or, haply, for bonneted Charles
Edward the Pretender, who, like the Wandering Jew, may yet be a
vagrant. At any rate, his loyalty was extreme. Unsolicited, he was my
laundress and tailor; a most expert one, too; and when at meal-times
my turn came round to look out at the mast-head, or stand at the
wheel, he catered for me among the "kids" in the forecastle with
unwearied assiduity. Many's the good lump of "duff" for which I was
indebted to my good Viking's good care of me. And like Sesostris I
was served by a monarch. Yet in some degree the obligation was
mutual. For be it known that, in sea-parlance, we were _chummies._

Now this _chummying_ among sailors is like the brotherhood subsisting
between a brace of collegians (chums) rooming together. It is a
Fidus-Achates-ship, a league of offense and defense, a copartnership
of chests and toilets, a bond of love and good feeling, and a mutual
championship of the absent one. True, my nautical reminiscenses
remind me of sundry lazy, ne'er-do-well, unprofitable, and abominable
chummies; chummies, who at