e company; it is never
offered, unless there be certainty to back it; it is, therefore, never
accepted; and the nearest approach we have ever made to Newport, as a
company, was one afternoon when we went to South-Boston Point in the
horse-car, and found the tide down. Silence reigned, therefore, and the
subject changed.

The next night we were at Ingham's. He unlocked a ravishing old black
mahogany secretary he has, and produced a pile of parchment-covered
books of different sizes, which were diaries of old Captain Heddart's.
They were often called log-books,--but, though in later years kept on
paper ruled for log-books, and often following to a certain extent the
indications of the columns, they were almost wholly personal, and
sometimes ran a hundred pages without alluding at all to the ship on
which he wrote. Well! the earliest of these was by far the most elegant
in appearance. My eyes watered a little, as Ingham showed me on the
first page, in the stiff Italian hand which our grandmothers wrote in,
when they aspired to elegance, the dedication,--

"TO MY DEAR FRANCIS,
_who will write something here every day, because he loves his_
MOTHER."

That old English gentleman, whom I just remember, when Ingham first went
to sea, as the model of mild, kind old men, at Ingham's mother's
house,--then he went to sea once himself for the first time,--and he had
a mother himself,--and as he went off, she gave him the best album-book
that Thetford Regis could make,--and wrote this inscription in ink that
was not rusty then!

Well, again! in this book, Ingham, who had been reading it all day, had
put five or six newspaper-marks.

The first was at this entry,--

"A new boy came into the mess. They said he was a French boy, but
the first luff says he is the Capptain's own nef-few."

Two pages on,--

"The French boy fought Wimple and beat him. They fought seeventeen
rounds."

Farther yet,--

"Toney is offe on leave. So the French boy was in oure watch. He
is not a French boy. His name is Doovarl."

In the midst of a great deal about the mess, and the fellows, and the
boys, and the others, and an inexplicable fuss there is about a
speculation the mess entered into with some illicit dealer for an
additional supply, not of liquor, but of sugar,--which I believe was
detected, and which covers pages of badly written and worse spelled
manuscript, not another distinct allusion to the French