nned and armed.

A group of ten or a dozen were collected around the fore-hatch, where
one of their number sat reading to them the twenty-seventh and
twenty-eighth chapters of Acts--two favorite chapters with seamen
generally, not that they contain any peculiarly glad tidings of great
joy, but because they give a sort of log-book account of almost the only
nautical transactions of moment recorded in holy writ.

The reader, like all who are so unfortunate as to be persuaded to read
to a company, was perpetually interrupted by some one of his auditors to
ask a question, or make a comment. He had, however, this advantage over
the ill-starred wight who essays to read to a party of ladies, that he
stopped and asked as many questions, and made as many remarks and
comments, as any of his auditors.

The reader, after a few verses, describing St. Paul's voyage, came to
the eighth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter: "And hardly passing it,
came unto a place which is called the Fair Havens," &c.; when old Tom
Jones, the boatswain, an old English man-of-war's man, who was lying on
his breast across the weather end of the windlass, interrupted:

"Now, as to all them places you've been reading about, I never heard of
none on 'em before, except Cyprus, and I've been cruising off there in a
frigate; but your Sea lashes and Pump fill ye (Cilicia and Pamphylia), I
never heard on in all my born days; and as for Fairhaven, why every body
knows that's right acrost the river from New Bedford; though how the
d--l they got there so soon I don't see, unless so be Paul worked a
marricle, and it's like enough he did, to let the rest on 'em know what
kind of a chap they'd got for a shipmate."

"Nevertheless," continued the reader, at the eleventh verse, "the
centurion believed the master and owner of the ship more than those
things that were spoken by Paul."

"Well, now I don't see no great harm in that," said one of the audience;
"Paul was nothing but a kind of Methodist parson, goin' about and
preachin' for his vittles and drink, and whatever folks was a mind to
give him; so 'taint likely he knowed any more about a ship than any
other minister."

"Yes, but you know he was a saint," said the reader, "and could foretell
the weather, aye, a year aforehand."

"Could he, faith?" said another, "then I wonder he did not make his
eternal fortin making almanacs."

"But what is a centurion?" asked a third.

"Centurion?" said old Jones, "why s