But I was too impatient to wait on my captain and see my ship--so I
bounced down the stairs, and in the twinkling of an eye, was on my
way to Stonehouse, where my vanity received another tribute, by a raw
recruit of marine raising his hand to his head, as he passed by me. I
took it as it was meant, raised my hat off my head, and shuffled
by with much self-importance. One consideration, I own, mortified
me--this was that the _natives_ did not appear to admire me half so
much as I admired myself. It never occurred to me then, that middies
were as plentiful at Plymouth Dock, as black boys at Port Royal,
though, perhaps, not of so much value to their masters. I will not
shock the delicacy of my fair readers by repeating all the vulgar
alliterations with which my noviciate was greeted, as I passed in
review before the ladies of North Corner, who met me in Fore Street.
Unsophisticated as I then was, in many points, and certainly in this,
I thought them extremely ill-bred. Fortunately for me, the prayers of
a certain description of people never prevail, otherwise I should have
been immediately consigned to a place, from which, I fear, all the
masses of France and Italy would not have extricated me.
I escaped from these syrens without being bound to the mast, like
Ulysses; but, like him, I had nearly fallen a victim to a modern
Polyphemus; for though he had not one eye in the middle of his
forehead, after the manner of his prototype, yet the rays from both
his eyes meeting together at the tip of his long nose, gave him very
much that appearance.
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