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‘’Tis pleasant to be taught in a strange tongue

By female lips and eyes’;

and continued to defer our studies till we should arrive in the South American vale of paradise, called Valparaiso. After arriving on that station, the commander, who had often expressed his wish that we should learn to speak Spanish, sent down ‘for all the young gentlemen’, as the middies are called, and commenced to ask us one by one—‘Can you speak Spanish?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Then you are no gentleman’. ‘Can you?’ But always receiving the same answer, he sent us out of the cabin as a set of blackguards. As he was as ignorant on this subject as any of us, we included him among the number, and thought it an excellent joke. Thus ended our scholastic duties on that ship. I was afterwards transferred to another vessel in which the schoolmaster was a young lawyer, who knew more about jetsam and flotsam than about lunars and dead reckoning—at least, I presume so, for he never afforded us an opportunity to judge of his knowledge on the latter subjects. He was not on speaking terms with the reefers, ate up all the plums for the duff, and was finally turned out of the ship as a nuisance. When I went to sea again, the teacher was an amiable and accomplished young man, from the ‘land of schoolmasters and leather pumpkin seed’. Poor fellow!—far gone in consumption, had a field of usefulness been open to him, he could not have labored in it. He went to sea for his health, but never returned. There was no schoolmaster in the next ship, and the ‘young gentlemen’ were as expert at lunars, and as au fait in the mysteries of latitude and departure, as any I had seen. In my next ship, the dominie was a young man, troubled like some of your correspondents, Mr. Editor, with cacoethes scribendi. He wrote a book. But I never saw him teaching ‘the young idea’, or instructing the young gentlemen in the art of plain sailing; nor did I think it was his fault, for he had neither schoolroom nor pupil. Such is my experience of the school system in the navy; and I believe that of every officer will tally with it”.[1]