and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on
the deck occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin
door, washes himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his
state-room, saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed,--as if the
hard narrow, uneasy shelf of a berth was anything like a bed!--and
you have heard at last pretty nearly all about the officers, and
their twenty and thirty years of sea-life, and every ocean and port
on the habitable globe where they have been. There comes a day when
you are quite ready for land, and the scream of the "gull" is a
welcome sound.

Even the sailors lose the vivacity of the first of the voyage. The
first two or three days we had their quaint and half-doleful singing
in chorus as they pulled at the ropes: now they are satisfied with
short ha-ho's, and uncadenced grunts. It used to be that the leader
sang, in ever-varying lines of nonsense, and the chorus struck in
with fine effect, like this:


"I wish I was in Liverpool town.
Handy-pan, handy O!

O captain! where 'd you ship your crew
Handy-pan, handy O!

Oh! pull away, my bully crew,
Handy-pan, handy O!"


There are verses enough of this sort to reach across the Atlantic;