tiff, like a dog-vane,
from the lofty mast, as the ship rode to the strong sea-breeze.

The stays and rigging came down from trucks, cross-trees, and tops in
straight black lines, from the great length of lower masts and
enormously square yards fore and aft; and from side to side, till they
met the long majestic hull and taper head-booms; while below were two
rows of ports, with the guns run out and the brass tompions gleaming in
their muzzles. The awnings were spread in one flat extended sheet of
white cotton canvas from bowsprit to taffrail, and from the wide-spread
lower booms at the fore-chains boats were riding by their painters.
Within a cable's length of the frigate's black quarter lay a low rakish
schooner, like a minnow alongside a whale, with a thin little coach-whip
streaming from her main-mast head, a long brass gun amidships, and
looking as trig and tidy as a French maid beside her portly mistress.

The bell struck in twin notes _eight_ on board the frigate, echoed back
from the pigmy schooner in a faint, double succession of tinkles; the
whistles resounded from deck to deck in ear-splitting notes, surging and
chirruping all together, and then suddenly ceasing with a rattling beat
of a drum and a short bellow of "Grog, ho!"

Between the guns of the main deck, and about the spar-deck battery
forward of the main-mast, sat five hundred lusty sailors on the white
decks around their mess-cloths, bolting hot pea soup after their grog,
and chatting and laughing in a devil-may-care sort of a strain, as if
the grub was good and the timbers sound, as they were, of the stanch
frigate beneath them. No noise, no confusion, but just as polite and
courteous, in their honest, seamanlike way, as half a legion of French
dancing-masters, they whacked off the salt pork before them with their
sheath-knives, munching the flinty biscuit, and all as happy and
careless of the past and future as clams at high water. Ay, there they
clustered, those five hundred sailors, in their snowy duck trowsers and
white, coarse linen frocks, with the blue collars laid square back over
their broad shoulders, exposing their bronzed and hairy throats, wagging
their jaws, and ready at any moment, at the tap of the drum, day or
night, to spring to the guns, and make the battery dance a jig as the
solid iron food went amid sheets of flame toward a foe. Yes, and ready,
too, in the gentle breeze or the howling tempest, to leap at the shrill
pipe of th