the twenty-four) were passed in terpsichorean performances on the
"fo'k'sl," and were so fascinating to the shorey mind that music was
specially composed for them, and the "Sailor's Hornpipe" is one of the
scourges inflicted upon mortals, for their sins, by barrel-organists at
the present day. Grog was dealt out to him by the gallon, and, as for
"backy," the light-hearted fellow was never allowed to suffer for want
of _that_; so that his happiness may be said to have been complete.

Things are sadly changed, now, with regard to poor JACK. Every day we
read of outrageous assaults upon him with marline-spikes and other
perverted marine stores, by brutal skippers and flagitious mates, whose
proper end would be the yard-arm and the rope's end. All belaying-pin
and no pay has made JACK a dull boy. His windpipe refuses to furnish the
whilom exhilarating tooraloo for his hornpipe. Silent are the "yarns"
with which he used to while away the time when off his watch and
huddling under the lee of the capstan with his messmates. And then, when
he comes ashore, it is only to be devoured by the sharks that lie in
wait for him and drag him away bodily to their obscene "boarding-house"
dens.

Once on a time JACK, when in dock, used to make holiday of it on Sunday.
He looked as gay as a tobacconist's sign when rigged out in his best
blue for a lark ashore, where he was occasionally to be seen on
horseback with a row of his jovial messmates, all of them sitting with
their backs to the horse's head, and the sternmost of them steering the
bewildered animal by his tail. Now there seems to be a movement to cut
off from JACK even the holiday to which he is surely entitled. The
captain of a bark, lying at San Francisco, has lately stopped wages, to
the amount of sixty-five dollars, from a seaman, because the latter
refused to assist in discharging cargo on Sunday. Blue has, in one