And so, long live the Carpenter!
  Long live his rosy wife!
  May children come and lengthen out
  Their happy span of life.
    May health and strength ne'er fail him,
    From sorrow or from pain;
    May he sing and work, with all his heart,
    And work and sing again.

CHAIRMAN'S SONG.

  BLOW aside the smoke, boys;
  Words are growing strong:
  Let us have no more of reason:
  It is good, but out of season.
  Who sings a song?

  Have we not been toiling
  From daybreak to the close;
  Some with hand and some with head, boys,
  Every one as he was bred, boys;
  Now let's repose!

  'Tis no time to quarrel:
  Calm should reign at night;
  Let the moon and stars above us,
  Let the tender hearts that love us,
  Set us all right.

  Silence! he who's loudest
  Is sure to be wrong.
  Now for a sad or merry measure,
  Tingling to the top with pleasure.
  Peace, ho!—the Song!

ALL DOOMED.

I WENT out to the Mediterranean in the
Negus. I came home in the Oporto. They
were both steamers of the Peninsular and
Oriental Company.

Nothing could be more distinct than the
Negus and Oporto captains. One was a dandy
captain; the other an old salt captain—BLOWHARD
I found the sailors called him; because
he liked rough weather, and was always in
highest spirits when the wind was highest. If
a hurricane rose and grappled with the ship like
a wrestling devil with a praying Puritan, then
he was calm, sturdy, unflinching; ready for
anything. Risen from a common sailor, Jolly (alias)
Blowhard had been pitching and tossing all
over the world. His complexion was chocolate-
colour, and the whites of his eyes were coffee-
colour. What, in other men, looked like wet
porcelain, was, in him, of a rich brown; partly
owing to repeated yellow fevers; partly owing
to malaria attacks on the coast of Africa. But,
in spite of his eyes, and short squat figure,
Captain Jolly was a real honest sailor;
punctiliously cautious of his ship's safety, and sparing
no pains nor anxiety to ensure us a quick
voyage. In all weathers he was upon the paddle-
box bridge, glass in hand, looking out for pilots,
or the mouths of rivers, or shore, or something;
never down to dinner with us, if the navigation
was at all risky.

Of the dandy captain of the Negus I cannot
say so much. He was too smart in his dress for
rough weather, too bright and unimpeachable
in his shining French-polished boots; always
wearing tight kid gloves; always tripping about
like a dancing-master and flirting with the ladies,
old or young; much too dapper, spruce, and
debonair for real use and honest rough weather;
too cultivated of taste and voice and manner to
be much trusted in danger; more fit, I thought,
for sunshine than storm. I never could fancy
the dandy captain on a raft, or handling nasty
tarred ropes, or raising blisters on his white
hands by cutting away a broken mast, or
surrendering his white cambric to tie up aloft for
a signal, or sweating at an oar, or pulling at
anything, or hauling anything. He was much too
clean and gentlemanlike, was the dandy captain.
But I may have done him wrong, and he may
rise to his real stature, and swell out to a perfect
Neptune in a storm. Still, I must confess, I
would rather face it with old Blowhard of the
Oporto, than with the dandy captain of the
Negus.

Well, with one I saw Cape Finistère, through
a glass darkly, and with the other the memorable
Cape Trafalgar, in the broad, open, blessed
sunlight, that capped its undulating brown cliff, as
we steamed on over the dead hosts that lie below
the waves. It was as we steered thoughtfully
past that glorious Cape, that Blowhard told me
how, off Tarifa, he had helped to lower David
Wilkie the painter into his deep blue undug
grave. From this time, I began to look with
veneration on Blowhard as an historical personage.

It was not, however, till one night that we
were lying off Vigo, dreading quarantine, and
waiting for the mail-boat to come off, that I
really understood Blowhard. We were there—
half a dozen of us—on the quarter-deck, waiting
for the boat that was to start from shore at five
minutes to gun-fire; it then wanted half an hour
or more to that explosion. We were not
particularly cheerful; for the yellow fever was in Vigo,
and we associated it in some way or other with
that gaudy yellow Spanish flag flying from the ship
of war up towards the quarantine harbour. The
green Welsh-looking hill shores looked mournful
and disconsolate to our discouraged eyes. The
great rocks that stood like petrified ships away
at the mouth of the bay loomed threatening, as
if they were drawn up to bar our escape. The
only sound that came to us from shore was the
heavy toll of a convent funeral bell, that told of
another victim to the disease some West Indian
ship had brought to this quiet Gallican bay,
where Admiral Vernon once broke the boom,
and swept in as a conqueror.

A lively man told us that the Vigo fever was
peculiarly infectious: carried off a man in an
hour; cramps and convulsions; doctors useless;
death-bell always going; buried without coffins,
and other pleasing and exhilarating intelligence
calculated to rouse the spirits and quicken the
pulse. Then some one volunteered a story about
the Welsh legend of the corpse light. Another
person told a story, horrible enough for Mrs.
Crowe, about second-sight, which our comic
man declared, if it meant seeing double, he had
known sometimes come on after dinner. All