ship. He was tall, and
very strongly built; long exposure to the weather, in every variety of
climate, had bronzed his countenance, and given him an older look than
his real years would have done under other circumstances; but at the
same time, long exposure to the weather had hardened his frame, and
strengthened his constitution, points of some importance forty years
since; so that his chances for a long life were much better than those
of a man of forty, especially one of modern date, who had never allowed
"the winds of heaven to visit his face too roughly." His age was, in
short, about sixty. His countenance, notwithstanding the rude and
ungenteel manner with which the winds and the weather had treated it,
was indicative of much good-nature and benevolence of disposition. He
raised his head from time to time, looked aloft at the sails,
occasionally addressed a word or two to the mate of the watch, who was
walking fore and aft the quarter-deck, and then resumed his reading.

In the weather mizen-shrouds was a remarkably handsome young man, of
four or five and twenty, busily engaged in hanging out to air his
"go-ashore" clothes; a very common Sunday morning occupation at sea,
when the weather is fine. Apparently the sight of his gay garments had
called up a train of ideas of a very varied and checkered hue, to judge
from the different expressions that flitted across his fine manly
countenance, at one moment shaded with anxiety and doubt, at another
bright with hope and joy. In height he was about five feet eight or nine
inches, strongly and compactly built, but far too stout and athletic,
too broad-shouldered and thin-flanked, to pass muster as an exquisite in
Broadway; as his form, though anatomically perfect, a model for a
statuary, and considered very fine by the ladies of his acquaintance
forty years since, would be altogether out of date at the present day.
His countenance, of an oval form, and shaded by rich, curling, chesnut
hair, from exposure to the weather, had acquired that healthy brown
that ladies do not dislike in a young man's face, though they carefully
eschew any thing that will in reality or imagination produce it in their
own lovely physiognomies.

It may be a mere old bachelor's whim of mine, but it always has appeared
to me that ladies who have had the advantage of mixing much in society,
and seeing something of human nature, are _not_ peculiarly partial to
that effeminate fairness of complexion