days of her memorable combat with the "Saucy Arethusa." "These five
hundred sailors," says a French newspaper, speaking of them in the
proper French way, "sword in hand, in the severe costume of board-ship
(la severe tenue du bord), seemed proud of the mission that they
had just accomplished. Their blue jackets, their red cravats, the
turned-down collars of blue shirts edged with white, ABOVE ALL their
resolute appearance and martial air, gave a favorable specimen of the
present state of our marine--a marine of which so much might be
expected and from which so little has been required."--Le Commerce: 16th
December.

There they were, sure enough; a cutlass upon one hip, a pistol on the
other--a gallant set of young men indeed. I doubt, to be sure, whether
the severe tenue du bord requires that the seaman should be always
furnished with those ferocious weapons, which in sundry maritime
manoeuvers, such as going to sleep in your hammock for instance,
or twinkling a binnacle, or luffing a marlinspike, or keelhauling a
maintopgallant (all naval operations, my dear, which any seafaring
novelist will explain to you)--I doubt, I say, whether these weapons are
ALWAYS worn by sailors, and have heard that they are commonly and very
sensibly too, locked up until they are wanted. Take another example:
suppose artillerymen were incessantly compelled to walk about with a
pyramid of twenty-four pound shot in one pocket, a lighted fuse and a
few barrels of gunpowder in the other--these objects would, as you may
imagine, greatly inconvenience the artilleryman in his peaceful state.

The newspaper writer is therefore most likely mistaken in saying that
the seamen were in the severe tenue du bord, or by "bord" meaning
"abordage"--which operation they were not, in a harmless church, hung
round with velvet and wax-candles, and filled with ladies, surely called