e!" interrupted Harry; "but consider what I must have
suffered if I had not got that dead weight pitched overboard. I was
labouring in the trough, man, and would have foundered with that spite
in my hold. Charity begins at home."

"'Tis a pity that the charity of many persons ends there too," said
Frank drily.

"Frank's wit is like the King of Prussia's regiment of death," said the
young seaman--"it gives no quarter. But come now, my lads, rig me out a
female craft fit for that snow-blooded youngster to go captain of in the
voyage of matrimony; do it shipshape, and bear a hand. I would try it
myself; but the room looks, to my eyes, as it were filled with dancing
logarithms; and then he's so cold, slow, misty-hearted"----

"That if," cried Rhimeson, interrupting him, "he addresses a lady as
cold, slow, and misty-hearted as himself, they may go on courting the
whole course of their natural lives, like the assymptotes of a
hyperbola, which approach nearer and nearer, _ad infinitum_, without
the possibility of ever meeting."

"Ha, ha, ha!--ay," shouted Harry; "and if he addresses one of a sanguine
temperament, there will be a pretty considerable traffic of quarrels
carried on between them, typified and illustrated very well by the
constant commerce of heat which is maintained between the poles and the
equator, by the agency of opposite currents in the atmosphere. By Jove!
Frank, matrimony presents the fire of two batteries at you; one rakes
you fore and aft, and the other strikes between wind and water."

"And pray, Harry, what sort of a consort will you sail with yourself?"
inquired Rhimeson. This was, perhaps, a question, of all others, that
the young sailor would have wished to avoid answering at that time. He
was the accepted lover of the sister of his friend Elliot--and, at the
moment he was running Frank down, to be, as he himself might have said,
brought up standing, was sufficiently disagreeable.

"Come, come, Harry," cried the young poet, seeing the sailor hesitate;
"let's have her from skysail-mast fid to keel--from starboard to
larboard stunsails--from the tip of the flying, jib-boom to the
taffrail."

"They're all fireships, Rhimeson!" replied Harry, with forced
gaiety--for he was indignant at Elliot's keen and suspicious
glance--"and, if I do come near them, it shall always be to windward,
for the Christian purpose of blowing them out of the water."

"A libertine," said Frank, significantly, "reviles w