creep in at the touch-hole, and
examining the whole interior of the tube, emerge at last from the
muzzle. Quoin swore by his guns, and slept by their side. Woe betide
the man whom he found leaning against them, or in any way soiling them.
He seemed seized with the crazy fancy, that his darling
twenty-four-pounders were fragile, and might break, like glass retorts.

Now, from this Quoin's vigilance, how could my poor friend the poet
hope to escape with his box? Twenty times a week it was pounced upon,
with a "here's that d----d pillbox again!" and a loud threat, to pitch
it overboard the next time, without a moment's warning, or benefit of
clergy. Like many poets, Lemsford was nervous, and upon these occasions
he trembled like a leaf. Once, with an inconsolable countenance, he
came to me, saying that his casket was nowhere to be found; he had
sought for it in his hiding-place, and it was not there.

I asked him where he had hidden it?

"Among the guns," he replied.

"Then depend upon it, Lemsford, that Quoin has been the death of it."

Straight to Quoin went the poet. But Quoin knew nothing about it. For
ten mortal days the poet was not to be comforted; dividing his leisure
time between cursing Quoin and lamenting his loss. The world is undone,
he must have thought: no such calamity has befallen it since the
Deluge;--my verses are perished.

But though Quoin, as it afterward turned out, had indeed found the box,
it so happened that he had not destroyed it; which no doubt led
Lemsford to infer that a superintending Providence had interposed to
preserve to posterity his invaluable casket. It was found at last,
lying exposed near the galley.

Lemsford was not the only literary man on board the Neversink. There
were three or four persons who kept journals of the cruise. One of
these journalists embellished his work--which was written in a large
blank account-book--with various coloured illustrations of the harbours
and bays at which the frigate had touched; and also, with small crayon
sketches of comical incidents on board the frigate itself. He would
frequently read passages of his book to an admiring circle of the more
refined sailors, between the guns. They pronounced the whole
performance a miracle of art. As the author declared to them that it
was all to be printed and published so soon as the vessel reached home,
they vied with each other in procuring interesting items, to be
incorporated into additional chapt