Ups and Downs of an Old Tar's Life. By "Eclipse."
(Digby and Long )—The writer entered the Royal Navy in times of peace —he tells us that he was born in the Waterloo year—and saw a good deal of the world in such services as were possible then. He saw the West Indies and Mexico ; then came back and had some more schooling, having began his sea-life at eleven. Getting afloat again, he was appointed as midshipman to a line-of-battle ship on the Eastern station; came back to Europe when the Carlist War was going on, and was at St. Helena when the remains of Napoleon were given up to the French. When the coffin was opened, the body was, he tells us, scarcely changed in look. A spell of service on the West African Coast followed. Here he captured a slaver after a sharp struggle, and so got his promotion. His African experiences were somewhat dreary, especially a long and sickly voyage, which he survived, he thinks, mainly through the "invigorating fumes of glorious tobacco." (Our "Old Tar" has no patience with the "anti-tobacconists.") The story is told throughout in a simple, pleasant fashion.
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