Chapter 83

A MAN-OF-WAR COLLEGE.

In our man-of-war world, Life comes in at one gangway and Death
goes overboard at the other. Under the man-of-war scourge, curses
mix with tears; and the sigh and the sob furnish the bass to the
shrill octave of those who laugh to drown buried griefs of their
own. Checkers were played in the waist at the time of Shenly's
burial; and as the body plunged, a player swept the board. The
bubbles had hardly burst, when all hands were _piped down_ by the
Boatswain, and the old jests were heard again, as if Shenly
himself were there to hear.

This man-of-war life has not left me unhardened. I cannot stop to
weep over Shenly now; that would be false to the life I depict;
wearing no mourning weeds, I resume the task of portraying our
man-of-war world.

Among the various other vocations, all driven abreast on board of
the Neversink, was that of the schoolmaster. There were two
academies in the frigate. One comprised the apprentice boys, who,
upon certain days of the week, were indoctrinated in the
mysteries of the primer by an invalid corporal of marines, a
slender, wizzen-cheeked man, who had received a liberal infant-
school education.

The other school was a far more pretentious affair--a sort of army
and navy seminary combined, where mystical mathematical problems
were solved by the midshipmen, and great ships-of-the-line were
navigated over imaginary shoals by unimaginable observations of the
moon and the stars, and learned lectures were delivered upon great guns,
small arms, and the curvilinear lines described by bombs in the air.

"_The Professor_" was the title bestowed upon the erudite
gentleman who conducted this seminary, and by that title alone
was he known throughout the ship. He was domiciled in the Ward-
room, and circulated there on a social par with the Purser,
Surgeon, and other _non-combatants_ and Quakers. By being
advanced to the dignity of a peerage in the Ward-room, Science
and Learning were ennobled in the person of this Professor, even
as divinity was honoured in the Chaplain enjoying the rank of a
spiritual peer.

Every other afternoon, while at sea, the Professor assembled his
pupils on the half-deck, near the long twenty-four pounders. A
bass drum-head was his desk, his pupils forming a semicircle
around him, seated on shot-boxes and match-tubs.

They were in the jelly of youth, and this learned Professor
poured into their susceptible hearts all the gentle gunpowder
maxims of war. Presidents of Peace Societies and Superintendents
of Sabbath-schools, must it not have been a most interesting sight?

But the Professor himself was a noteworthy person. A tall, thin,
spectacled man, about forty years old,