monkey, sitting out there on the sprit-sail yard, which played such a trick with my best jacket t'other day, was only a roast goose, well stuffed with potatoes and onions, he and I would soon be on better terms than we are at present."
"Why, Tackle, in case such a metamorphose should befall the poor monkey, I myself would not object to join your mess, as I don't relish pea-soup , and made but a slight dinner on it. But I think I heard you give the girls at P.- a touch of sentiment when we lay there."
"Ay, ay, one's forced to that now and then. Why, they expect it, as a matter of course; and after a cruise in the Tropics, if one could not tell them of spicy breezes, and orange groves, they'd set him down for a greenhorn. Now, for my part, though I spun them a yarn, as long as a main-top bowline, about orange groves, full of lovely nymphs, and such balderdash, I never saw but one grove of the kind, during all my cruising in the West Indies; and the fair damsel it contained was none other than a nigger, baking cassaba bread on an old rusty griddle. She, too, was such a fright, that the first luff's dog, which I had along with me, barked himself into a fit of the croup, at the mere sight of her. I have always thought, however, that the little blue-eyed girl we both admired so much, was quizzing me; for when I found myself hove short, and so tailed on a quotation, she set up a giggle at it."
"What was it, pray?"
"Why," said I, " as the poet says of the arrival of Columbus in the New World,
"when woods of palm,
And orange groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytien seas."
"The deuce you did ! How could the groves and trees blow over the seas?"
"So thought I, unless it might be in a hurricane; so I corrected myself, and said, " I mean the leaves from the trees, of course, Miss;" but she smiled at that, too ; and as there was nought else to give her but the roots, I stopped at that, and hauled up for the supper table.”
"My dear fellow, the words are:—
"When the land wind from the woods of palm,
And orange groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytien seas."
"Well, well, 'land wind,' or sea breeze,' if you ever catch me prating sentiment or poetry to a girl again, slacken up all my lanyards in a gale of wind, and clap a rocky lee shore close
