of fish, and were driven about the upper deck in various fashionable
styles, including four-in-hand and tandem, by other slim city-children,
whose lower extremities had been treated in the same beneficial manner
by the same eminent physicians. The musicians had laid away their
cornopeans and other cunningly twisted horns upon the broad disk of the
big drum, in a dark alcove between-decks, and were fishing savagely in
German and broken English, according to the nationality with which their
affairs happened to get entangled. Even the colored _chef de cuisine_,
a muscular mulatto, with a beard of a rash disposition, coming out on
wrong parts of his face in little eruptive pustules of black wool,
sported his lines out of the galley-airholes, and his porgies were
simmering in the pan while their memories were yet green in the
submarine parishes from which they came. Have these finny creatures
their full revenge upon fishermankind, when a smack sinks foundered into
the swallowing deep? Do the midnight revellers in the sea-caverns
call out in broad Scuppaug to the attendant mermaid for a "half-dozen
large-sized jolterheads on the half monkey-jacket?" To these queries I
hope that Poetical Justice, if still living, will forward a reply at
her earliest convenience. Porgy now began to pervade the air with an
astringent perfume of the sea: none of your Fulton Market smells of
stagnating fish, but a clean, wholesome, coralline odor, such as we
may imagine supplied to the Peris "beneath the dark sea" by the scaly
fellows in the toilet line down there, who are likely to keep it for
sale in conch-shells,--quarts and pints. Porgy prevailed to that extent,
in fact, that it came to be talked of, by-and-by, as a circulating
medium; and a hard-fisted mechanic averred his intention of compensating
his landlady for his board with porgy, for the week that was passing
away.

For some time, luck appeared to favor the starboard side of the boat,
at which the take was much greater than at the other. Hence, discontent
began to crawl in at the port-gangways, and the fishermen on that
side were gradually edging over to the other, to look for a chance of
stealing in their lines clandestinely between the ranks. This led to
an interchange of bad compliments, as well as to a very perceptible
slanting of the deck, and the captain piped out to the hands to shift
the chain-box. And by this action was resolved for me a riddle with
regard to the properties a