ps might have enabled the look-out man on
board the admiral to discover the stranger, when it was physically
impossible, owing to the curvature of the earth, that she could have
been seen on board the frigate. No attention, however, was paid to
this remark, and a punishment due only to crime, or to a manifest
breach of discipline, was inflicted.

The very next day, the same officer, whose remonstrance had proved so
ineffectual, saw the look-out man at the flag ship's mast-head again
pointing out at a strange sail. The frigate chanced to be placed
nearly in the direction indicated; consequently she must have been
somewhat nearer to the stranger than the line-of-battle ship was. But
the man stationed at the frigate's mast-head declared he could
distinguish nothing of any stranger. Upon this the officer of the
watch sent up the captain of the maintop, an experienced and
quick-sighted seaman, who, having for some minutes looked in vain in
every direction, asserted positively that there was nothing in sight
from that elevation. It was thus rendered certain, or at all events
highly probable, that the precipitate sentence of the day before had
been unjust; for, under circumstances even less favourable, it
appeared that the poor fellow could not by possibility have seen the
stranger, for not first detecting which he was punished!

I must give the conclusion of this painful story in the words of my
informant, the officer of the deck:--"I reported all this to the
captain of the ship, and watched the effect. He seemed on the point of
acknowledging that his heart smote him; but pride prevailed, and it
was barely an ejaculation that escaped. So much for angry feelings
getting the better of judgment!"

The following anecdote will help to relieve the disagreeable
impression caused by the incident just related, without obliterating
the salutary reflections which it seems calculated to trace on the
mind of every well-disposed officer.

Three sailors, belonging to the watering-party of a man-of-war on a
foreign station, were discovered by their officer to have strayed from
the well at which the casks had been filled. These men, it appears,
instead of assisting in rolling the heavy butts and puncheons across
the sand, preferred indulging themselves in a glass of a most
insidious tipple, called Mistela in Spanish, but very naturally
"transmogrified" by the Jacks into Miss Taylor. The offenders being
dragged out of the pulperia, were c