s life does not average much more than forty years, from
exposure, hardships, and privations. Though not stricken in years,
according to the usual signification of the phrase, Old Cuff had
certainly _lived a great deal_, and had seen a great deal, there being
scarcely a habitable corner of the world that he had not visited, or of
the private history and internal economy of which he could not relate
many anecdotes; so that he might, without arrogance or vanity, have
assumed to himself the proposed motto of the Jesuits:

"Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris!"

He commenced his career as cook and cabin-boy on board a "horse-jockey;"
one of those vessels which carry horses, mules, and other cattle to the
West Indies; a title bestowed upon them by sailors, who are very much in
the habit of indulging in that figure of speech called by rhetoricians
metonymy; in this instance applying the genuine name of all Connecticut
men, and some Rhode Islanders, to a fore-topsail schooner, or
hermaphrodite brig, as the case might be. He was next, by a sort of
metamorphosis, or rather metastasis, not uncommon with those of "steady
habits," a travelling tin-pedler; and his adventures and hard bargains,
during a visit or two to the western and southern states, might prove
highly entertaining to my readers, had I not seen some twenty or thirty
of them lately going the rounds of the newspapers, which Old Cuff has
often very gravely assured us, in our "quarter watches" in the main-top,
were actually perpetrated by himself. By a transition still easier, and
perhaps more natural, from a tin-pedler he transmuted himself into an
itinerant preacher, and from conscientious motives endeavored to repair
the injury he had done to the pockets of his customers with his
white-oak nutmegs, horn gun-flints, and bass-wood cucumber seeds, by
supplying them with pure unadulterated orthodox Calvinism, fresh from
the Saybrook Platform. Nor did he confine his usefulness to beating the
"drum ecclesiastic;" during the long winters in the country, he "kept
school," as it is somewhat perversely called; whereas, in nine cases out
of ten, it is the school that "keeps" the schoolmaster.

But "the sow that was washed returned to her wallowing in the mire;" and
in like manner Cuff left off steering the souls of sinners through the
temptations and sorrows of this wicked world, or the infant mind through
the intricacies of a--b ab, and once more betook himself