sing on downy pillows with your wives and little ones beside you!
Ah! take pity on the sailor, and scatter your shining gold over him in
his distress.

When the time comes, as come it may, when the cannon of a hostile fleet
are thundering at your ports; when your lumbering craft are flying
before the rapacious grasp of quick-heeled cruisers, and fiery bombs are
hissing through the pure air, bursting in your marble palaces and
blasting your stores of wealth to dust, _then_ you will turn with
blanched faces to the sea, and wonder why you have so long forgotten the
noble hearts and stalwart arms that once were thrown around you. But not
before.

On the flush quarter-deck of the frigate, by the raised signal lockers
abaft, stood a bronzed old quarter-master, a spy-glass resting on his
arm, through which every minute he peered around the harbor, giving an
eye, too, occasionally to the half-hour glass, whose sands dribbled
steadily into the lower bulb on the locker beside him.

What cared he--no wife or child to cheer him! No cares save but to see
that the ensign did not roll foul of the halyards, that the broad
pennant blew out straight, that the half-hour glass did not need
turning, and that no boat approached the frigate without his reporting
it to the officer of the watch. Naught else save, perhaps, whether the
other old quarter-master, Charley Holmes, down below there on the
gun-deck, had wiped from his lips the moisture of the midday grog, and
would be up in time to take the relief while the pea soup was warm.
Nothing else.

The lieutenant of the watch briskly paced the solid deck, scrubbed white
as milk with lime-juice and molasses, the even seams between the planks
glistening like the strands of a girl's raven tresses as his profane and
rapid feet pressed upon them. What thought he in his careless walk, with
the gleaming bunch of bullion on his right shoulder, sword by his side,
white trowsers, and gilt eagle buttons on his navy-blue coat?

He was thinking how his pittance of pay would support, in a scrimpy way,
his poor mother and sister, who looked unto him as their only hope and
refuge. And he thought, too, as he tramped that noble deck, made
glorious by many a battle and victory in which he had borne a humble
part, that his rich and powerful country would eventually reward him
with increased pay and promotion. Were the single dollar which lay alone
in his trowsers pocket, and the light mist which arose off th