ch across the bay. If it had been mine "to make reply," I
should undoubtedly have made this, that I would see the quartermaster
hanged, and his superiors, before I risked myself in any such
rattletrap. But as, unfortunately, it was mine to go where I was sent, I
merely set the orderly to throwing out fish with the boys, and began to
talk with the father.

Queer enough, just at that moment, there came over me the feeling that,
as a graduate of the University, it was my duty to put up those red,
white, and blue scaly fellows, who were flopping about there so briskly,
and send them in alcohol to Agassiz. But there are so many duties of
that kind which one neglects in a hard-worked world! As a graduate, it
is my duty to send annually to the College Librarian a list of all the
graduates who have died in the town I live in, with their fathers' and
mothers' names, and the motives that led them to College, with anecdotes
of their career, and the date of their death. There are two thousand
three hundred and forty-five of them I believe, and I have never sent
one half-anecdote about one! Such failure in duty made me grimly smile
as I omitted to stop and put up these fish in alcohol, and as I plied
the unconscious skipper with inquiries about his boat. "Had she ever
been outside?" "O signor, she had been outside this very day. You cannot
catch _tonno_ till you have passed both capes,--least of all such fine
fish as that is,"--and he kicked the poor wretch. Can it be true, as
C---- says, that those dying flaps of theirs, are exquisite luxury to
them, because for the first time they have their fill of oxygen? "Had he
ever been beyond Peloro?" "O yes, signor; my wife, Caterina, was herself
from Messina,"--and on great saints' days they had gone there often.
Poor fellow, his great saint's day sealed his fate. I nodded to
Frank,--Frank nodded to me,--and Frank blandly informed him that, by
order of General Garibaldi, he would take the gentleman at once on
board, pass the strait with him, "and then go where he tells you."

The Southern Italian has the reputation, derived from Tom Moore, of
being a coward. When I used to speak at school,

"Ay, down to the dust with them,--slaves as they are!"--

stamping my foot at "dust," I certainly thought they were a very mean
crew. But I dare say that Neapolitan school-boys have some similar
school piece about the risings of Tom Moore's countrymen, which
certainly have not been much more succ