on the question.  Although it was many years since he had seen the book, and it was a subject with which he had had no previous acquaintance, yet he had the chain of reasoning, founded upon principles of political economy, fully in his memory; and his facts, so far as I could judge, were correct; at least, he stated them with precision.  The principles of the steam-engine, too, he was familiar with, having been several months on board a steamboat, and made himself master of its secrets.  He knew every lunar star in both hemispheres, and was a master of the quadrant and sextant.  The men said he could take a meridian altitude of the sun from a tar bucket.  Such was the man, who, at forty, was still a dog before the mast, at twelve dollars a month.  The reason of this was to be found in his past life, as I had it, at different times, from himself.

He was an Englishman, a native of Ilfracomb, in Devonshire.  His father was skipper of a small coaster from Bristol, and, dying, left him, when quite young, to the care of his mother, by whose exertions he received a common-school education, passing his winters at school and his summers in the coasting trade until his seventeenth year, when he left home to go upon foreign voyages.  Of this mother he spoke with the greatest respect, and said that she was a woman of a strong mind, and had an excellent system of education, which had made respectable men of his three brothers, and failed in him only from his own indomitable obstinacy.  One thing he mentioned, in which he said his mother differed from all other mothers that he had ever seen disciplining their children; that was, that when he was out of humor and refused to eat, instead of putting his plate away, saying that his hunger would bring him to it in time, she would stand over him and oblige him to eat it,—­ every mouthful of it.  It was no fault of hers that he was what I saw him; and so great was his sense of gratitude for her efforts, though unsuccessful, that he determined, when the voyage should end, to embark for home with all the wages he should get, to spend with and for his mother, if perchance he should find her alive.

After leaving home, he had spent nearly twenty years sailing upon all sorts of voyages, generally out of the ports of New York and Boston.  Twenty years of vice!  Every sin that a sailor knows, he had gone to the bottom of.  Several times he had been hauled up in the hospitals, and as often the great strength of his constitution had brought him out again in health.  Several times, too, from his acknowledged capacity, he had been promoted to the office of chief mate, and as often his conduct when in port, especially his drunkenness, which neither fear nor ambition could induce him to abandon, put him back into the forecastle.  One night, when giving me an account of his life, and lamenting the years of manhood he had thrown away, ``There,’’ said he, ``in the forecastle, at the foot of those steps, a chest of old clothes,