f sunken rocks,
which often approach to within a few feet of the surface without being
visible. The depth is usually marked by poles or buoys, and it often
happens that the steamer plies her way for hours between these
water-marks, where there is no other indication of danger. The Swedish
and Finnish pilots are proverbially among the best in the world. We
had an old Finn on board--a shaggy old sea-dog, rough and
weather-beaten as any of the rocks on his own rock-bound coast, who, I
venture to say, never slept a wink during the entire passage, or if he
did, it was all the same. He knew every rock, big and little, visible
and invisible, that lay on the entire route between Abo and Stockholm,
and could see them all with his eyes shut. An uncouth, hardy, honest
old monster was this Finn--a Caliban of a fellow, half human, half
fish--with a great sou'wester on his head, a rough monkey-jacket
buttoned around his body, and a pair of boots on his legs that must
have been designed for wading over coral reefs, through seas of
swordfish, shovel-nosed sharks, and unicorns. His broad, honest face
looked for all the world like a granite boulder covered with barnacles
and sea-weed, and ornamented by a bunch of mussels for a nose, and a
pair of shining blue pebbles by way of eyes; and when he spoke, which
was not often, his voice sounded like the keel of a fishing-smack
grating over a bank of gravel. I strongly suspect his father was a
sea-lion and his mother a grampus or scragg whale, and that he was
fished up out of the sea when young by some hardy son of Neptune, and
subsequently trained up in the ways of humanity on board a
fishing-smack, where the food consisted of polypi, lobsters, and black
bread. Yet there was something wonderfully genial about this old
pilot. He chewed enormous quantities of tobacco, the stains of which
around his mouth greatly improved the beauty of his countenance; and
when he was not chewing pigtail he was smoking it, which equally
contributed to soften the asperities of his features. Having sailed
in many seas, he spoke many languages, but none very intelligibly,
owing to some radical defect in the muscles of his mouth. As to the
channel between Abo and Stockholm, which lies partly through the Aland
Islands and numerous adjacent rocks, above and below water, I believe
he had traveled over it so often that he could steer a vessel through
it standing backward as readily as box the compass, or shut both his
e