lubber.' I followed after him with much the same feelings which I had
before when I followed the man with the red face, until we came down to
where the ships were, and then we descended a sort of ladder, or stairs,
at the foot of which I stumbled into a boat, and had like to have gone
overboard into the water. At this, the people in the boat set up a great
laugh at my clumsiness,--just as if I had ever been in a boat before,
and could help being clumsy. To make the matter worse, I sat down in the
wrong place, where one of the men was to pull an oar; and when, after
being told to 'get out of that,' with no end of hard names, I asked what
bench I should sit on, they all laughed louder than before, which still
further overwhelmed me with confusion. I did not then know that what I
called a 'bench,' they called a 'thwart,' or more commonly 'thawt.'

"At length, after much abuse and more laughter, I managed to get into
the forward part of the boat, which was called, as I found out, 'the
bows,' where there was barely room to coil myself up, and the boat being
soon pushed off from the wharf, the oars were put out, and then I heard
an order to 'give way,' and then the oars splashed in the water, and I
felt the boat moving; and now, as I realized that I was in truth leaving
my home and native land, perhaps to see them no more forever, my heart
sank heavy in my breast; and it was as much as I could do to keep the
tears from pouring out of my eyes, as we glided on over the harbor.
Indeed, my eyes were so bedimmed that I scarcely saw anything at all
until we came around under the stern of a ship, when I heard the order
'lay in your oars.' Then one of the men caught hold of the end of a
rope, which was thrown from the ship; and, the boat being made fast, we
all scrambled up the ship's side; and then I was hustled along to a hole
in the forward part of the deck (having what looked like a box turned
upside down over it), through which, now utterly bewildered, I
descended, by means of a ladder, to a dark, damp, mouldy place, which
was filled with the foul smells of tar and bilge-water, and thick with
tobacco-smoke. This, they told me, was the 'fo'casle,' that is,
forecastle, where lived the 'crew,' of which I became now painfully
conscious that I was one. If there had been the slightest chance, I
should have run away; but running away from a ship is a very different
thing from running away from a farm.

[Illustration: The Romance of t