These admonitions are solely addressed to the more diminutive class of
midshipmen--those under five feet high, and under seven stone in weight.

Truly, the records of the steerages of men-of-war are full of most
melancholy examples of early dissipation, disease, disgrace, and death.
Answer, ye shades of fine boys, who in the soils of all climes, the
round world over, far away sleep from your homes.

Mothers of men! If your hearts have been cast down when your boys
have fallen in the way of temptations ashore, how much more bursting
your grief, did you know that those boys were far from your arms,
cabined and cribbed in by all manner of iniquities. But this some of
you cannot believe. It is, perhaps, well that it is so.

But hold them fast--all those who have not yet weighed their anchors
for the Navy-round and round, hitch over hitch, bind your leading-
strings on them, and clinching a ring-bolt into your chimmey-jam,
moor your boys fast to that best of harbours, the hearth-stone.

But if youth be giddy, old age is staid; even as young saplings,
in the litheness of their limbs, toss to their roots in the fresh
morning air; but, stiff and unyielding with age, mossy trunks
never bend. With pride and pleasure be it said, that, as for our
old Commodore, though he might treat himself to as many "_liberty
days_" as he pleased, yet throughout our stay in Rio he conducted
himself with the utmost discretion.

But he was an old, old man; physically, a very small man; his
spine was as an unloaded musket-barrel--not only attenuated, but