BUNSBY GETS EXCITED. 385 
It was with fearful speed that we had drifted around 
the angular corner of the in-shore rock, and it was soon 
left far, far astern. Men began again to look around 
them and breathe freely : the danger was past ; we again 
went on our careless way. 
‘‘Blast her miserable timbers !” said our friend Bunsby, 
as he took the old ship in at a single indignant glance : 
“if she’d only them chaps in Congress as her crew, them 
in the Cabinet as her officers, and the old President for 
cap’n, I’d as soon see her sink as float, — shiver her !” And, 
with this emphatic expression of “an opinion as was an 
opinion,” he wondered “how much longer we had to live 
now;,” and threw from his mouth a piece of exhausted 
tobacco which must have weighed something more than 
an ounce. 
Indignation at being sent to sea in such a ship was 
evidently the paramount feeling in Bunsby’s breast at 
that moment. What a most unreasonable being he was, 
truly, to indulge in such a wish as to the various heads 
of the Government! Who would not approve, as fair and 
just, the arming of a good swordsman with a bending 
lath and sending him to fight his battle ? It was, I sup- 
pose, upon this principle that we — machines of flesh and 
blood whose only duty it is to obey orders — -wqvo armed 
with a miserable old craft, neither sail-vessel or steamer, 
and sent to battle the gales of every clime, to discover 
and locate the very dangers which better ships do their 
best to shun. Would that we were all Bunsbys, or that 
common sense and humanity would combine to sweep 
from the ocean all such man-traps as the ci-devani water- 
25 
