The Jung Vrouw, meanwhile, is as giddy as ever, nay, worse ten times told. She hath taken a tinge of high-flying, deep-living, German Romanticism into her wooden head, and is try
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ing, plunge after plunge, to drown herself, and to make me commit wilful suicide along with her, whether I will or not. After that, there is no hope; but oh! yet oh, my Fates, let me die upon land. I have a horror of shipboard! The idea of severing all ties in this cabin is trebly agonising. Why, the very table is tied to the floor, the candlestick to the table, the snuffers to the candlestick, the extinguisher to the snuffers. Only the burning candle is unattached, and there—there it jumps into bed! No matter; it could as soon set fire to the Thames. Another squall! How she groans, creaks, squeaks, strains, grinds, and squeezes, like a huge walnut in Neptune’s crackers? Accursed Jung Vrouw! thou wilt be the widowing of my poor dear old one! Accursed Peter Stuckey, thou wilt be the murdering of my poor deaf old self!
I know not, for a surety, by reason that everything about me is quaking and shaking, but I suspect I am trembling like an aspen. It is impossible to hear, in the midst of this universal hubbub, but methinks, I am wailing and weeping aloud. But one may as well make a manly exit. Like other men, in such sea extremities, I would fain betake me to the rum-cask; but either Hans Vandergroot sails on Temperance principles, or I have looked in the wrong place. I will try a stave or two instead.
“Full fathom five—”
 
THE BEST BOWER ANCHOR.
Alas! it will not go down. I am too much out of sorts for even the “delicate Ariel.” It was one thing for Shakspeare, sailing, hugging the shore, never out of sight of land, on the safe serene coasts of Bohemia, to compose such a sea song for the wood and canvas Tempests of the stage; but it is another guess thing to hear it, as I do, howled through hoarse ship-ropes, by Boreas himself, in a real storm. What comfort to me that everything about me shall suffer a sea-change?—that my bones shall turn, forsooth, into coral? I would not give a bad
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 doit, with some of these poor metacarpal bones of mine to be rubbing the gums of the Royal Infant of Spain. I am not so blindly ambitious as to wish that these two precious useful balls of mine, turned into pearls, should shine in the British crown itself, or, what is more tempting, in the hair of the beautiful Countess of B. What if some economical jeweller—I think I feel him at it—should take it into his head to split them, for setting in a ring? As for the Syren’s knell, I would as lief have it as long hereafter as may be, from the plain prosaic old sexton of St. Sepulchre’s. I have no depraved yearning to be first wet-nursed to death, and then “lapped in Elysium,” by Mermaids, the most cold, flabby, washy, fishy, draggletails ever invented to give any human fancy the ague—half-and-half monsters, neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring. A whole cargo of them, nay a glut of them, leaping alive, unfit for loving
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 or eating, is not worth one loveable real woman at Billingsgate, or one of the eatable maids on her stall. I could never imagine the boldest and gallantest boatswain encountering such a sea-witch, on a lone beach—combing the shrimps out of her wet sandy mud-coloured hair, and wriggling her foolish tail about, curling, or stretching it, or trying to put it into her pocket, forgetting that she has no pockets, as a shy man in company does not know what to do with his hands—I could never fancy him looking on such a creature, however attached to the fair sex, without his recoiling till he tumbled over his own pigtail, singing out, with a slight variation of a line of Dibdin’s,
“Avert yon ’oman, gracious Heaven!”
For other sea-temptations, I would not give my old white pony, that stumbles over every stone in his road, and some out of it, to ride like that Lord Godolphin Arion over the seas on the fairest fish that was ever foaled. Speaking under fear of death, I would rather, waving all the romance, ride in a rill by a roadside on a stickle-back. On my solemn word, I would far liefer bestride even a pond perch with his dorsal fin erect. But hark! What means that dreadful cry? Our death-bell is tolling in Dutch—“Del, del, is verlooren!”
I must scramble, crawl, haul myself, spite of my sprained ankles, up unto the deck how I may. Next best unto witnessing our own funeral is the seeing how we are done to death.
What a sight! Here is the tiller tied hard a-port, or hard a-lee, as hard as they can tie it. Further back is the Skipper himself, entangled dismally by some cord or other to the stern-rails; and yonder is his mate, with a hundred and fifty turns of rope round himself and the mizen-mast, which he seems trying to strengthen. The gunner, as I take him to be, with a preposterous superfluity of breeching, is made fa............