As we are overhauling old friends, do you remember
Charley Capstan, the coxswain's mate of the Leander V "Shiver my
timbers, but I do; and a bit of tough yarn he was, too: hard as old junk
without, and soft as captain's coop meat within. Wasn't I one of the
crew that convoyed him up this very street when returning from a cruise
off the Straits, we heard that Charley's old uncle had slipt his cable,
and left him cash enough to buy out and build a ship of his own? That
was a gala, messmate! There was Charley, a little fat porpoise, as
round as a nine-pounder, mounted on an eighteen gallon cask of the
real Jamaica, lashed to a couple of oars, and riding astride, on his
messmates' shoulders, up to the Point. Then such a jolly boat's crew
attended him, rigged out with bran new slops, and shiners on their
topmasts, with the Leander painted in front, and half a dozen fiddlers
scraping away 'Jack's alive,' and all the girls decked out in their
dancing dresses, with streamers flying about their top-gallants, and
loose nettings over their breastworks--that was a gala, messmate! And
didn't Charley treat all Point to the play that night, and engage the
whole of the gallery cabin for his own friends' accommodation; and when
the reefers in the hold turned saucy, didn't you and two or three more
~189~~drop down upon 'em, and having shook the wind out of their sails,
run up the main haliards again, without working round by the gangway?"
"Right, Tom, right; and don't you remember the illumination, when we
stuck up ten pound of lighted candles round the rim of the gallery
before the play began, and when Jane Shore was in the midst of her
grief, Charley gave the signal, and away they went, like a file of
marines from a double broadside, right and left, tumbling about the ears
of the reefers and land lubbers in the chicken coops below? Those were
the days of glory, messmate, when old Jack Junk, who had never seen a
play before, took it all for right down arnest matter o' fact; and when
poor Mrs.
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