sail over towards Jackson, whose business it was to confine the reef corner to the yard.

"His hat and shoes were off; and he rode the yard-arm end, leaning backward to the gale, and pulling at the earing-rope like a bridle. At all times, this is a moment of frantic exertion with sailors, whose spirits seem then to partake of the commotion of the elements as they hang in the gale between heaven and earth; and then it is, too, that they are the most profane.

"Haul out to windward!' coughed Jackson, with a blasphemous cry, and he threw himself back with a violent strain upon the bridle in his hand. But the wild words were hardly out of his mouth when his hands dropped to his side, and the bellying sail was spattered with a torrent of blood from his lungs.

"As the man next him stretched out his arm to save, Jackson fell headlong from the yard, and with a long seethe, plunged like a diver into the sea.

"It was when the ship had rolled to windward, which, with the long projection of the yard-arm over the side, made him strike far out upon the water. His fall was seen by the whole upward-gazing crowd on deck, some of whom were spotted with the blood that trickled from the sail, while they raised a spontaneous cry, so shrill and wild that a blind man might have known something deadly had happened.

"Clutching our reef-joints, we hung over the stick, and gazed down to the one white bubbling spot which had closed over the head of our shipmate; but the next minute it was brewed into the common yeast of the waves, and Jackson never arose. We waited a few minutes, expecting an order to descend, haul back the fore-yard, and man the boats; but instead of that, the next sound that greeted us was, 'Bear a hand and reef away, men!' from the mate."

CHAPTER V

DISCOVERIES ON TWO CONTINENTS

"If you read of St. Peter's, they say, and then go and visit it, ten to one, you account it a dwarf compared to your high-raised ideal. And, doubtless, Jonah himself must have been much disappointed when he looked up to the domed midriff surmounting the whale's belly, and surveyed the ribbed pillars around him. A pretty large belly, to be sure, thought he, but not so big as it might have been."

-HERMAN MELVILLE: Redburn.

THE merchantman on which Melville shipped was not a Liverpool liner, or packet-ship, plying in connection with a sisterhood of packets. She was a regular trader to Liverpool; sailing upon no fixed days, and acting very much as she pleased, being bound by no obligation of any kind, though in all her voyages ever having New York or Liverpool for her destination. Melville's craft was not a greyhound, not a very fast sailer. The swifter of the packet ships then made the passage in fifteen or sixteen days; the Highlander, travelling at a more matronly pace, was out on the Atlantic a leisurely month.

"It was very early in the month of June that we sailed," says Melville; "and I had greatly rejoiced that it was that time of year; for it would be warm and pleasant upon the ocean I thought; and my voyage would be like a summer excursion to the seashore for the benefit of the salt water, and a change of scene and society." But the fact was not identical with Melville's fancy, and before many days at sea, he found it a galling mockery to remember that his sisters had promised to tell all enquiring friends that he had gone "abroad”: “just as if I was visiting Europe on a tour with my tutor." Though his thirty days at sea considerably disabused him-for the time of the unmitigated delights of ocean travel in the forecastle; still always in the vague and retreating distance did he hold to the promise of some stupendous discovery still in store. Finally, one morning when he came on deck, he was thrilled

to discover that he was, in sober fact, within sight of a foreign land: a shore-line that in imagination he transformed into the seacoast of Bohemia. "A foreign country actually visible!" But as he gazed ashore, disillusion ran hot upon the heels of his romantic expectations.

"Was that Ireland? Why, there was nothing remarkable about that; nothing startling. If that's the way a foreign. country looks, I might as well have stayed at home. Now what, exactly, I had fancied the shore would look like, I can not say; but I had a vague idea that it would be something strange and wonderful."

The next land they sighted was Wales. "It was high noon, and a long line of purple mountains lay like a bank of clouds against the east. But, after all, the general effect of these mountains was mortifyingly like the general effect of the Kaatskill Mountains on the Hudson River."

It was not until midnight of the third day that they arrived at the mouth of the Mersey. Before the following daybreak they took the first flood.

"Presently, in the misty twilight, we passed immense buoys, and caught sight of distant objects on shore, vague and shadowy shapes, like Ossian's ghosts." And then it was that Melville found leisure to lean over the side, "trying to summon up some image of Liverpool, to see how the reality would answer to my concept.'

As the day advanced, the river contracted, and in the clear morning Melville got his first sharp impression of a foreign port.

"I beheld lofty ranges of dingy ware-houses, which seemed very deficient in the elements of the marvellous; and bore a most unexpected resemblance to the ware-houses along South Street in New York. There was nothing strange, nothing extraordinary about them. There they stood; a row of calm and collected ware-houses; very good and substantial edifices, doubtless, and admirably adapted to the ends had in view by the builders: but yet, these edifices, I must confess, were a sad and bitter disappointment to me."

Melville was six weeks in Liverpool. Of this part of his

adventure, he says in Redburn: "I do not mean to present a diary of my stay there. I shall here simply record the general tenor of the life led by our crew during that interval; and will proceed to note down, at random, my own wanderings about town, and impressions of things as they are recalled to me now after the lapse of so many (twelve) years."

Not the least important detail of these six weeks is the fact that Melville and his ship-mates were very well fed at the sign of the Baltimore Clipper. "The roast beef of Old England abounded; and so did the immortal plum-puddings and the unspeakably capital gooseberry pies." Owing to the strict but necessary regulations of the Liverpool docks, no fire of any kind was allowed on board the vessels within them. And hence, though the sailors of the Highlander slept in the forecastle, they were fed ashore at the expense of the ship's owners. This, in a large crew remaining at Liverpool more than six weeks, as the Highlander did, formed no inconsiderable item in the expenses of the voyage. The Baltimore Clipper was one of the boarding houses near the docks which flourished on the appetite of sailors. At the Baltimore Clipper was fed not only the crew of the Highlander, but, each in a separate apartment, a variety of other crews as well. Since each crew was known collectively by the name of its ship, the shouts of the servant girls running about at dinner time mustering their guests must have been alarming to an uninitiated visitor.

"Where are the Empresses of China?-Here's their beef been smoking this half-hour"-"Fly, Betty, my dear, here come the Panthers"—"Run, Molly, my love; get the salt-cellars for the Splendids"-"You, Peggy, where's the Siddons' pickle-pot?"-"I say, Judy, are you never coming with that pudding for the Sultans?"

It was to the Baltimore Clipper that Jackson immediately led the ship's crew when they first sprang ashore: up this street and down that till at last he brought them to their destination in a narrow lane filled with boarding-houses, spirit-vaults and sailors. While Melville's shipmates were engaged in tippling and talking with numerous old acquaintances of theirs in the neighbourhood who thronged about the door, he sat alone

in the dining-room appropriated to the Highlanders "meditating upon the fact that I was now seated upon an English bench, under an English roof, in an English tavern, forming an integral part of the British empire."

Melville examined the place attentively. "It was a long narrow little room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles stuck into mortar. A dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden ship suspended from the ceiling. The walls were covered with a paper, representing an endless succession of vessels of all nations continually circumnavigating the apartment. From the street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies, and drunken sailors."

It was during this disenchanting examination that the realisation began to creep chillingly over Melville that his prospect of seeing the world as a sailor was, after all, but very doubtful. It seems never to have struck him before that sailors but hover about the edges of terra-firma; that "they land only upon wharves and pier-heads, and their reminiscences of travel are only a dim recollection of a chain of tap-rooms surrounding the globe."

Melville's six weeks in Liverpool offered him, however, opportunity to make slightly more extended observations. During these weeks he was free to go where he pleased between four o'clock in the afternoon and the following dawn. Sundays he had entirely at his own disposal. But withal, it was an excessively limited and distorted version of England that was open for his examination. Except for his shipmates, his very distant cousin, the Earl of Leven and Melville and Queen Victoria and such like notables, he knew by name no living soul in the British Isles. And neither his companions in the forecastle, nor the remote and elaborately titled strangers of Melville House, offered encouragement of an easy and glowing intimacy. With but three dollars as his net capital-money advanced him in Liverpool by the ship-and without a thread of presentable clothing on his back, he could not hope promiscuously to ingratiate himself either by his purse or the adorn