Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/25

 visited Washington several times in later years. It was a grand sight to look upon these great men.

One afternoon the captain paid us a visit, in order to get hold of our wages. I do not know what he thought of us, for we felt and looked like two drowned rats. We were smeared all over with mud, and were wet through and through to the skin. We told him that this slinging mud was not sailor’s duty. He told us to seek a better lay. The next day we went down to Alexandria and shipped in the brig Joseph, bound  to Philadelphia. At Philadelphia, while we lay alongside a wharf at the foot of South Street, a fine-looking man came along and gave each man on board a tract. He spoke very kindly, offering some good advice. Luckily, he proved to be an uncle of mine, and, getting permission from the captain, I went home with him. Philadelphia is, I believe, called the "City of Brotherly Love." I found my cousins the pleasantest people I had ever seen. Philadelphia is, in fact, the most homelike city I was ever in, excepting Boston — of course there is no place like the "Hub" to me. My cousins lived on either



Street, I do not remember which.

I arrived in Boston after a fifteen-days’ passage, all right, and found all glad to see me back home again.

After working a short time in a hook and eye factory, and stubbing my toes against the pavements, I shipped  in the navy for the African station. In a few days, however, I was transferred from the receiving-ship Columbus