observe pipes, strange in form and fashion—
not alone meerschaums and cherry-sticks of
foreign make, but also yards of clay with
outlandish bowls and tubes. Lastly, you are
to be struck by the fact, that, although
three-fourths of the company present are nautical
men, you cannot detect any one nautical item
in any portion of their attire. Sic vos non
vobis. The stout little man in the rough
brown coat and wide-awake has just come
home from Smyrna, and is going back again
in ballast, which, in the shape of sand, he is
comedown river to load himself with, from this
portion of the Kentish coast. The tall, lean,
wiry, sallow-faced man, wearing a fluffy white
hat, a brown frock-coat, light cord trousers
very much pulled up over his Wellington boots,
and a steel watchguard exactly like a patent
corkscrew, is a Yankee skipper, come on shore
to see if he can pick up some sea-stores
advantageously for the return voyage. Observe
that he has whittled away a considerable portion
of the circular wooden platter on which
the pewter pots are placed, and has spat his
and his neighbour's spittoon quite full, and is
now sowing expectoration broadcast on the
boots of the company underneath the table.
His ship is a temperance ship, and he is a
temperance man; for, although he has to all
appearances consumed two or three tumblers
of grog already (judging from the rubicund
hue of the bumpers supplied him), his
refreshment is, in reality, nothing more than a
harmless compound, or temperance cordial
called raspberry. All publics frequented by
those who "go down to the sea in ships"
keep a store of this, and similar cordials, such
as gingerette, lemonette, orangette, all mixing
with sugar and hot water in a duly groggy
manner, but all perfectly innocuous and teatotal.
There are snuggeries in Liverpool,
frequented almost solely by American
captains—temperance captains be it understood—
which have no sale at all for malt or alcoholic
liquors.

The fat, grey-headed, farmer-like man in
the body coat, pepper and salt trousers, and
brown gaiters, with a heavy bunch of
watchseals at his fob and a broad-brimmed hat, is
a pilot; not one by any means you will say
resembling the interesting individual with
bushy whiskers, snowy ducks, varnished hat,
telescope, and black neckerchief tied in a
nautical knot, who very properly enjoined
the impertinent passenger to go below to his
berth and trust in Providence on a certain
fearful night: for which vide the song and
Mr. Brandard's lithographed frontispiece
thereto. The pilot I have first introduced
you to does not answer to the lithographed
pilot. He is not at all like him. I never saw
one like him; I never even saw a pilot in a
pilot coat, though I have seen one in a hat
like a London dustman's, in a Jerry hat, in a
costerrnonger's fur nap, and in a red nightcap.
Never a one like him of the lithograph. But,
my dear sir, is anything in life like the lithograph,
or the book, or the canvas, or the
proscenium picture thereof? Is a Royal
Academy brigand like a Calabrian brigand?—a
Royal Italian Opera Swiss maiden like a young
girl of any one of the thirteen Cantons? Are
poet-shepherdesses like women who tend
sheep? Are stage peasants like
Buckinghamshire labourers? Is any imitation,
reproduction, or representation of life, like life?
—of man, like man? All men are liars. Put
pencils or pens, or 'broidering needles in our
hands, we straightway fall a lying, and lie our
heads out of shape, calling that imagination,
fiction, forsooth!

The long low room of the Trinchinopoly
Crab, though by day a very Lybian desert of
sandy floor, tenantless settles, and
pyramid-spittoons, and drawing, perhaps, scarcely a
butt of beer per month, does a roaring trade
at night; for there are always ships in the
river, and boats to row, and skippers who
have used the Crab before, and nautical
tradesmen eager to meet them; though this
river-side house is a good mile and a quarter
from any village, or even inhabited house.
Decent, honest, civil, God-fearing men are
these seamen-captains the nobly great
majority of them that is of every port and
nation. From the blunt whaling captains at
Hull and Glasgow, to the mighty mail
steamer skippers at Liverpool or Southampton,
they are almost invariably the same:
civil of speech, quiet of demeanour, modest of
assertion, and incapable of grandiloquence,
almost to a fault. They will tell you diffidently
of the Isles of Greece that they "were
down Cerigo way once with fruit;" whereas
young Swallowpounce of the Treasury, whose
Mediterranean travels I verily believe have
never extended beyond Malta, is for ever
bragging of and quoting

         "Eternal summer gilds them yet,
           But all except their sun is set."

Have they been to India? Um, yes: Calcutta,
and so on, said as easily as "Chelsea."
The terrible Patagonian promontory, the
awful and inhospitable land of Terra del
Fuego is to them merely The Horn; and
Venice, the Adriatic, Dalmatia, Styria, are
all summed up in a simple "Up the Gulf
as far as Tryeast with hides." Farewell, ye
seamen-captains, honest men, who as
pertinaciously persist in wearing chimney-pot hats
and frockcoats, as your pictorial and literary
delineators are incorrigible in delineating you
in large-buttoned peacoats, wide ducks, and
flat hats. Simple-minded men, making the
little parade you do of your travelling lore
and nautical learning—leaving the first only
to be guessed at in your mahogany cheeks
and sun-crimsoned foreheads and embrowned
hands; the second only to be known in the
hour of danger and peril, when the sea runs
mountains high, and the masts bend like
whips, and the rigging writhes like the tresses
of a woman possessed.