GREEN HANDS. 27 



:>f their out-fit, and strutted about in linsey wool- 

 sey shirts, ill-fitting pepper-and-salt trowsers, and 

 glazed hats; evidently producing quite an im 

 pression upon themselves, as well as upon their 

 less fortunate comrades, who not yet having 

 shipped, were compelled to retain their now 

 heartily despised " longtogs." 



Yery few among them had beards. Most of 

 them were very young men, or rather, overgrown 

 boys already too large ever to become good sea- 

 men but just at that age when they would con- 

 tract all the vices of the sailor, without gaining 

 one of the good qualities which, in Jack Tar, 

 sometimes go far to counterbalance and cover up 

 his multitude of sins. I felt sorry for these strip- 

 lings, thus sundering themselves from all the re- 

 straints of civilized life. There were among them 

 some intelligent faces, and a few, a very few not 

 more than two or three of the fifty or sixty 

 present who bore in their countenances and 

 their manners the unmistakable evidences of 

 careful and moral training. 



Most of those before me had already made a 

 beginning upon the paths of vice, and for them 

 the sea was pleasant only in so far as they thought 

 to find in a sailor's life a larger license than the 

 laws and customs of the shore permit. 



I was not long in the hall, ere I found my- 

 self an object of very general attention, its in- 

 mates evidently guessing at once that I was a 

 sailor, the gei uine article which some of them 



