fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously buttered,
and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more
respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.
It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled
ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures
in their huge bakehouses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal
mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me
jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow.
And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough.
It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come
of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers,
or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just
previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been
lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys
stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you,
from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction
of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.
But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get
a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to,
weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think
the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly
and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance?
Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old
sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch
me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;