ecision and attention on the part of the seamen, because it is
_Sunday_. Then the quiet decorum voluntarily observed; the attention to
divine service, which would be a pattern to a congregation on shore; the
little knots of men collected, in the afternoon, between the guns,
listening to one who reads some serious book; or the solitary
quarter-master, poring over his thumbed Testament, as he communes with
himself--all prove that sailors have a deep-rooted feeling of religion.
I once knew a first-lieutenant receive a severe rebuke from a ship's
company. This officer, observing the men scattered listlessly about the
forecastle and waist of the frigate, on a fine Sunday evening, ordered
the fiddler up, that they might dance. The ship's company thanked him
for his kindness, but stated that they had not been accustomed to dance
on that day, and requested that the music might be sent below.

The Sunday on board a man-of-war has another advantage over the Sabbath
on shore: it is hallowed throughout. It commences with respect and
reverence, and it ends with the same. There is no alehouse to resort
to, where the men may become intoxicated; no allurements of the senses
to disturb the calm repose of the mind, the practical veneration of the
day, which bestows upon it a moral beauty.

It was on the evening of such a day of serenity, after the hammocks had
been piped down and the watch mustered, that Captain M--- was standing
on the gangway of the _Aspasia_, in conversation with Macallan, the
surgeon. It was almost a calm: the sails were not _asleep_ with the
light airs that occasionally distended them, but flapped against the
lofty masts with the motion communicated to the vessel by the undulating
wave. The moon, nearly at her full, was high in the heavens, steering
for the zenith in all her beauty, without one envious cloud to obscure
the refulgence of her beams, which were reflected upon the water in
broad and wavering lines of silver. The blue wave was of a deeper
blue--so clear and so transparent that you fancied you could pierce
through a fathomless perspective, and so refreshing, so void of all
impurity, that it invited you to glide into its bosom.

"How clear the moon shines to-night! to-morrow, I think, will be full
moon."

"It would be well," observed the surgeon in reply to remark of the
captain, "to request the officer of the watch to permit the men to sleep
on the upper deck. We shall have many of them moon-b