Smart stood up to look for a good place,
but all were equally bad.

"Hold on by your eyelashes and put down
the helm! " he cried. " Give it her, boys!"

It was time, for a great wave toppled over
about two yards from the boat, half filling
her with water.

"Pull! Don't stop to bale her! You be
off (apostrophising the wave)! You needn't
roar; for I've seen bigger than you!"

Of which fact we also had ocular
demonstration, almost before he had finished
speaking. He stood up in the stern and shouted
to me:

"Jump into the bows—quick! for by the
Lord we shall have it!"

When I got there I sang out, " Come along,
forward, Smart! " But he shook his head,
and would not leave the rudder.

The next moment, crash it came; and, with
a roar, took us for about forty or fifty yards,
as nearly bottom upward as could be. Then
we went right in-shore in the scurry. The
minute she touched the bottom I jumped
overboard and scrambled ashore.

I never shall forget Smart's face just at
that moment when I called to him to leave
the rudder. You could see, in spite of all his
swearing and blustering, what a vast amount
of cool courage and determination he had in
real danger. How he kept his feet when
that wave broke I can't imagine. As soon
as he landed I shook hands with him; and,
whilst I could not but feel that it was not in
the power of any known waves to upset his
boat, I said, I thought we were well out of her.

The Yankee broke out directly:

"Call that a bad sea? Guess it's nauthin'!

GOING A-MAYING.

To go a-Maying now-a-days in real earnest,
would perhaps be about as pleasant a pastime
of its kind, all things considered, as to
saunter in the height of the May season
down the sunny side of Pall Mall, in a
slashed doublet, with clocks to one's stockings
—or, as it might be to a man of nervous
temperament, to don (tassels and all) those
wonderful hessians one still occasionally
meets in the Strand, like a pair of Warren's
blacking advertisements on a walking
expedition in search of the cat. Taking heart
of grace however, for a purely imaginary
excursion of this kind, one may loiter back
for once with profit into the old times, as
though of a truth into "fresh fields and
pastures new," and go a-Maying at least in
Dreamland.

I care not though the axe has long since
been laid to the root of the old Maypole
sung of by Pope, once standing not a hundred
miles off,

  Where Catharine Street descends into the Strand.

I take as my leaping-staff an older Maypole
yet, the one of which an older poet still, Dan
Chaucer, to wit, chaunts proudly, as of

      the great shaft in Cornhill,

and I am back at a bound in those glad
sylvan generations.

Have we not, indeed, in one sense, a peculiar
right to go a-Maying thus in fancy; we
whose age, perhaps more signally than all the
ages past, has given to May the loveliest of
its poetic celebrations? Whose hand more
exquisitely than that of our living laureate
ever crowned " The Queen of the May " in
lyric coronation? Whose voice ever more
charmingly apostrophised the glory of the
spring-time than that of the veteran songster
still happily surviving, still happily carolling
to the close.

      Oh, thou merry month complete,
      May, thy very name is sweet!

And has not another poet of these times
—a true poet of the pencil depicted as never
brush of painter did before, the abundant
splendours of the May blossom? Answer
that—any one who bears in mind the bower
of hawthorn in the great historic picture of
Alfred in the Danish camp—where one could
actually smell to them! those delicious
blossoms blooming upon the canvas from
the magic palette of the Academician. So,
by the brush of Daniel Maclise, by the pen
of Leigh Hunt, by the lyre of Alfred
Tennyson, I claim as of right the privilege of
maundering back whenever I list, from the
click of the electric needle, and the roar of
the steam-engine, and the clatter of the
spinning-jenny, back into the spring meadows
of yore, where the English lads and lasses
went a-Maying. Besides, in this I surely
do but in regard to time what each year is
done in regard to distance by every English
emigrant at our antipodes. There, cherishing
a strong home-love at heart, he eats his
Christmas pudding still on the twenty-fifth
of December, in the heat of the southern
dog-days—that pudding no longer decorated,
may be, with a wintry sprig of holly, but
with the roses of an Australian midsummer.
So here, too, though in a very different
atmosphere, may one dream the time away
thus as a fancied Mayer; now, when in these
days of crinoline à-la-mode, no less surely
than in those of the rustic fardingale, there
comes tripping daintily over the earth — as
daintily as when Milton sang of her in those
bewitching numbers,

                                the delicate-footed May,
      With her slight fingers full of leaves and flowers.

It is a melancholy truth to begin with,
undoubtedly, that I cannot honestly avow
in that couplet from Brown's Pastorals:

      I have seen the Lady of the May
      Set in an arbour on a holiday.

Yet have I, within moderate recollection,