Ready, 0 Really! or, These Forty Years. By the Captain
of the Cumberland. (Sampson Low and Co.)—The Cumberland is a training ship for boys, for whose benefit the Captain tells the story of his life, and tells it in a way that must, we should say, have touched and interested them in no common degree. Older read:,ra will sometimes find them- selves "robbed the wrong way," for the "Captain" has decided opinions, which he expresses decido:lly. Ha approves of flogging, for instance, which he thinks "the most fitting, humane, and effectual punishment for lawless blackguards ;" and would encourage boys in fighting out their differences; and therefore is not in accord with the humanitarians. He has, it is evident, profound religious feeling, and a sincerity of belief which some people—not we, indeed—will call superstitions. He tells at story, for which he seems to have had good authority, of a whole family seeing an angel by the bedside of a dying brother ; and is quite confident that God helped him to make the best score at rifle practice, in order to show that a religious officer need not be a milksop. But then, he says, David-believed that it was the Lord "who taught his hands to
war and his fingers to Besides this, there is plenty in the book
of what is amusing. Her.• is a Port-Admiral's notion of the end of the 1 world, when the ninety-gnu ship in which the author was a middy ran ' on to the rocks in front of Fort St. Angelo :—"Here. Captain C—! Here is the finest line-of-battle ship in the world on shore, and tho midshipmen buying fruit out of fhe st ‘rn ports!" And here is a marvellous story of the Esquimaux dogs :- c• We used to keep a hole in the ice for the purpose of soaking our salt meat, which was made fast to the cud of several fathoms of stout line when lowered down the hole ; but repeatedly on coming to betel it up we found that the meat had disappeared. What prowling sea-robbers did the deed our naturalists were unde- cided upon, and the mystery remained unsolved until one morning early, a man going on deck saw all the. dogs clustered round the ice-hole, and watching them, was initiated into the whole proceed- ing. One dog only had a hand—or rather a paw—in it, the rest 1) ,ing merely interested on-lookers. This dog. putting his head down the hole, took a grip of the line with his teeth. and hauled up a length; on this he put his paw, reached his head down again, pulled up another length, and so by the process known as • hand over hand ' proceeded until the prize was landed."
Scarcely less marvellous were the pigs which grew fat on coals. Alas ! this is no longer an economical discovery.
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