the duty of the ship to go on much more smoothly, than before.

This duty was trying. During the day-time, the squadron was placed in a line, each ship nearly ten miles from the other, so they swept as they sailed on, more than a degree and ahalf of longitude in their observation: as night appeared they closed gradually near the Terrific in the centre, and all this time they carried all the sail they could with safety to the masts; but the enemy for whom they were in search eluded them still. But during all this hard work, did any one ever make, or, more important yet, any one partake, of a devil's dumpling? Yes, and they were first brought on the Commodore's table, and there too they were first eaten, at least, as far as I can collect from persons who sailed in the ship at the same time.

Three days after he had given out his culinary instructions, as the Commodore was seated at table with his first lieutenant, the officer of the forenoon watch, one half-starved

reefer, the chaplain at the foot of the table, and the purser on his right hand, their host made the usual excuses of being able to give them no more than the ship's provisions, made more appetizing by the skill of the cook. For the first course, there was at one end of the table a soup made of the ship's pease-grey-coated gentlemen that scorned to be split, and endued with a surprising hardness of heart, considering the boiling to which they had been subjected; but this preparation was made unctuous, and consequently nutritious, by gobbets of fat and rancid salt-pork, floating amongst the impervious pease; and at the other end there stood a suberb tureen of lobscouse. Everybody knows what lobscouse is; it is a dish fit for the gods, and of that satisfying nature, that a spoonful is sufficient for a whole year for a mere mortal, when he can get anything else to eat.

There were two dishes of fish in the centre: a shark had been caught the day before,

and these dishes were parts of one of themstrips of the tail fried in Florence oil, and the other strips of the said tail boiled an naturel, as a Frenchman would say, both dishes to be grinned at, if you like, but at the same time, most certainly to be eaten if you are ravenously hungry. At the very short stay of the squadron at Rio Janeiro, there had not been sufficient time to lay in any stock of vegetables whatever, therefore the Captain's cook had most judiciously not sent up any of those watery and unsubstantial aliments. He knew that neither his master nor his guests were Pythagoreans. But, though there were no vegetables, generally so named, yet there was one very excellent dish of vegetable growth, and as fresh as any nobleman could have procured it, at his lordly mansion in merry old England. It was an exquisite salad, made of mustard and cress, grown in the garden of the Commodore's stern walk. The table was, from first to last, well furnished

with good wines, though Sir Octavius was never known, fond as he was of his glass, to commit, at sea, an excess in drinking.

On the second course, the pease-soup gave place to a dish of very thin slices of fried salt pork laid upon biscuits, well soaked in fresh water, to make them soft, and then fried with sweet oil with the pork. This dish would not have been amiss, had not the biscuits been too rich with the multitudes of fat white maggots, and the crustaceous wevils that had burrowed all over them. Many people acquire a taste for these living condiments: we wish them joy of their aptibility of increasing the sources of their enjoyments-maggots in our head, we may have got, and we will keep them too, please God; but we will also keep maggots out of our mouth as long as we can. Every one to his taste, as the ostrich said, when he gobbled up a bushel of tenpenny nails.

The remove for the fish in the centre, was a solid, and noble-looking imitation of a sirloin of

beef, modelled in red rock-salt; it was a deception, but a grand one, as it smoked, and a few pendules of fat hung about it. The purser tried to get a slice off it with the carving-knife, but it turned the edge of the instrument; and there was an end of the matter. There is no doubt but that once it formed a component part of a living bull, that had passed a long life of gallantry to the Ios of that most gallant of all countries, the gem of the sea; but now the saltpetre had crystallised the animal fibre, and the sirloin was, at present, only a little less solid than a fossil remain.

At the vain attempt to carve with a knife, what perhaps could only be separated by a mason's saw, the Commodore shook his head roguishly at the purser, and said to him, "You are like him mentioned in the scripture-when we ask you for food you give us stones."

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"Under sufferance," said the chaplain, you should have said bread, Sir Octavius."