Extraordinary Daring of a Yankee.

What it wrought.

agility hurled his ponderous harpoon right over the English boat. Thrown with unwonted force and precision, it struck the monster in a vital part, and was buried to the socket.

The English boat, thus strangely intercepted and balked of its prize, shrunk back under the warp of its Yankee rival. The waves were soon crimsoned with blood, and the daring American took possession of the mastered Leviathan, while Delego Bay echoed and re-echoed with shouts of applause.

All honor to whalemen, bold and brave! We will sing for them, in passing, Park Benjamin's song:

How cheery are the mariners

Those lovers of the sea!

Their hearts are like its yesty waves,

As bounding and as free.

They whistle when the storm-bird wheels

In circles round the mast;

And sing when, deep in foam, the ship

Plows onward to the blast.

What care the mariners for gales?
There's music in their roar,
When wide the berth along the lee,
And leagues of room before.
Let billows toss to mountain heights,
Or sink to chasms low,

The vessel stout will ride it out,

Nor reel beneath the blow.

Park Benjamin's Song for the cheery Mariner.

GOD keep those cheery mariners!

And temper all the gales

That sweep against the rocky coast
To their storm-shattered sails;
And men on shore will bless the ship
That could so guided be,

Safe in the hollow of His hand,

To brave the mighty sea!

The Pickle a Whaleman most loves to have his Ship in.

CHAPTER XIII.

PECULIAR VOCABULARY AND HAZARDS OF WHALE

MEN.

A perilous life, and hard as life may be,
Hath the brave whaleman on the lonely sea;
On the wide water laboring, far from home,

For a bleak pittance still compelled to roam;

Few friends to cheer him through his dangerous life,
Or strong to aid him in the stormy strife;

Companion of the Sea and silent air,

The hardy whaleman has no envied fare.-Anon.

Midway between the False and Main Banks, Atlantic Ocean, lat. 34° 30' S., lon. 47° W. Homeward Bound.

LIKE the eagerness and activity, and can very well put up with the smell and dirt which having dead whales alongside makes in a whale ship. We are having enough of it just now. Though not myself head and ears over in blubber-juice like all the rest, nor in for any share of the profits, I am taking, perhaps, as curious and eager an interest in the process going on as any one on board. All the ordinary muxing and skimshander with which active ones keep themselves busy on board whale ships when

Matter for the Dictionary.

Divers kinds of Muxing.

there is no work to do, are laid aside now. The cooper's driver is merry a-going on the great oil casks; the decks are cluttered, and full of gurry and dirt; and every body and every thing is besmeared with oil, and will be so until a strong ley they make from the ashes of the scraps has washed all clean.

It is almost worth taking one cruise in a whale ship to see how they capture and dispose of their gigantic game, and to learn some odd things a man can never know otherwise. Had Noah Webster ever gone a whaling, he would have been able to add some five or six notable and genuine English words to his Dictionary, which may never be known off salt water unless we record them here.

Mux and skimshander are the general names by which they express the ways in which whalemen busy themselves when making passages, and in the intervals of taking whales, in working up sperm whales' jaws and teeth and right whale bone into boxes, swifts, reels, canes, whips, folders, stamps, and all sorts of things, according to their ingenuity.

Gurry is the term by which they call the combined water, oil, and dirt that "cutting in"