comfortable and unmoving drawing-rooms to the tinkling of Chickering's
pianos. What are the songs the sailor sings to the accompaniment of the
thrilling shrouds, the booming double-bass of the hollow topsails, and the
multitudinous chorus of Ocean? What does the coaster, in his brief walk
"three steps and overboard," hum to himself, as he tramps up and down his
little deck through the swathing mists of a Bank fog? What sings the cook
at the galley-fire in doleful unison with the bubble of his coppers?
Surely not songs that exult in the life of the sea. Certainly not, my
amateur friend, anything that breathes of mastery over the elements. The
sea is a real thing to him. He never is familiar with it, or thinks of it
or speaks of it as his slave. It is "a steed that knows his rider," and,
like many another steed which the men of the forecastle have mounted,
knows that it can throw its rider at pleasure, and the riders know it too.
Now and then a sailor will utter some fierce imprecation upon wind or sea,
but it is in the impotence of despair, and not in the conscious, boastful
mastery which the land-songs attribute to him. What, then, does the sailor
sing?--and does he sing at all?

Certainly the sailor sings. Did you ever walk through Ann Street, Boston,
or haunt the purlieus of the Fulton Market? and when there did you never
espy a huckster's board covered with little slips of printed paper of the
size and shape of the bills-of-fare at the Commonwealth Hotel? They are
printed on much coarser paper, and are by no means as typographically
exact as the aforesaid _carte_, or as this page of the "Atlantic Monthly,"
but they are what the sailor sings. I know they are there, for I once
spent a long summer's day in the former place, searching those files for a
copy of the delightful ballad sung (or attempted to be sung) by Dick
Fletcher in Scott's "Pirate,"--the ballad beginning

"It was a ship, and a ship of fame,