ate,
or fireplace to go to; no, your only way to keep warm is to keep in a
blazing passion, and anathematise the custom that every morning makes a
wash-house of a man-of-war.

Look at it. Say you go on board a line-of-battle-ship: you see
everything scrupulously neat; you see all the decks clear and
unobstructed as the sidewalks of Wall Street of a Sunday morning; you
see no trace of a sailor's dormitory; you marvel by what magic all this
is brought about. And well you may. For consider, that in this
unobstructed fabric nearly one thousand mortal men have to sleep, eat,
wash, dress, cook, and perform all the ordinary functions of humanity.
The same number of men ashore would expand themselves into a township.
Is it credible, then, that this extraordinary neatness, and especially
this _unobstructedness_ of a man-of-war, can be brought about, except
by the most rigorous edicts, and a very serious sacrifice, with respect
to the sailors, of the domestic comforts of life? To be sure, sailors
themselves do not often complain of these things; they are used to
them; but man can become used even to the hardest usage. And it is
because he is used to it, that sometimes he does not complain of it.

Of all men-of-war, the American ships are the most excessively neat,
and have the greatest reputation for it. And of all men-of-war the
general discipline of the American ships is the most arbitrary.

In the English navy, the men liberally mess on tables, which, between
meals, are triced up out of the way. The American sailors mess on deck,
and pick up their broken biscuit, or _midshipman's nuts_, like fowls in
a barn-yard.

But if this unobstructedness in an American fighting-ship be, at all
hazards, so desirable, why not imitate the Turks? In the Turkish navy
they have no mess-chests; the sailors roll their mess things up in a
rug, and thrust them under a gun. Nor do they have any hammocks; they
sleep anywhere about the decks in their _gregoes_. Indeed, come to look
at it, what more does a man-of-war's-man absolutely require to live in
than his own skin? That's room enough; and room enough to turn in, if
he but knew how to shift his spine, end for end, like a ramrod, without
disturbing his next neighbour.

Among all men-of-war's-men, it is a maxim that over-neat vessels are
Tartars to the crew: and perhaps it may be safely laid down that, when
you see such a ship, some sort of tyranny is not very far off.

In the Neversink, as i