much to the contrary.

I was one day going up the street of Ryde with Harry, when we saw a
crowd of women and children and a few men and boys standing round the
model of a full-rigged ship, and we heard a loud voice singing out--

"Cease, rude Boreas, stormy railer;
List, ye landsmen all, to me;
Messmates, hear a brother sailor
Sing the dangers of the sea."

Then came the sound of a fiddle, and the singer continued his song to
his own accompaniment.

"Let us stop and hear the old sailor," said Harry, drawing me towards
the crowd.

We found room just opposite where the man was standing. I then saw that
he had a timber leg, and that the ship was placed on a stand with a lump
of lead fixed to the end of a bent iron rod at the bottom, which made it
rock backwards and forwards.

"Oh yes! oh yes! all you good people, lend a ear to poor Jack's yarn,"
he continued; "and you pretty girls with the blue eyes and rosy cheeks,
and you with the dark ones, who does more harm with your blinkers, when
you've the mind, among the hearts of young fellows than ever our ships
gets from the guns of the Frenchmen. There aren't many men in the navy
of Old England who has seen queerer sights, or gone through more ups and
downs in life than the timber-toed old tar who stands afore you, and who
lost his leg in action aboard the _Thunderer_, seventy-four, when we
took a Frenchman and hauled down his colours afore he knew where he was.
There aren't many either, I've a notion, who've been worse rewarded, or
more kicked about by cruel fate, or you wouldn't find him playing the
fiddle and singing songs for your amusement. Howsomdever, that's
neither here nor there, and I daresay you wish to hear the end of his
stave, and so you shall when each on you has helped to load this here
craft with such coppers or sixpences or shillings as you may chance to
have in your pockets, and I daresay now a golden guinea wouldn't sink
her. Just look at her, always a-tossing up and down on the salt sea;
that's what we poor sailors have to go through all our lives. She's a
correct model of the _Royal George_, that famous ship I once served
aboard when she carried the flag of the great Admiral Lord Hawke; and
which now lies out there at Spithead fathoms deep below the briny ocean,
with all her drownded crew of gallant fellows, no more to hear the
tempest howling, or fight the battles of their king and country!"

I had been looking hard at the old sai