ing magisterial as the Lord High Admiral of England. Hat in hand, the sailors stood deferentially in a semi-circle before him, while the captain held the ship-papers in his hand, and one by one called their names; and in mellow bank notesbeautiful sight!-paid them their wages. . . . The sailors, after counting their cash very carefully, and seeing all was right, and not a bank-note was dog-eared, in which case they would have demanded another, salaamed and withdrew, leaving me face to face with the Paymaster-general of the Forces." Melville stood awhile, looking as polite as possible, he says, and expecting every moment to hear his name called. But no such name did he hear. "The captain, throwing aside his accounts, lighted a very fragrant cigar, took up the morning paper-I think it was the Herald-threw his leg over one arm of the chair, and plunged into the latest intelligence from all parts of the world."

Melville hemmed, and scraped his foot to increase the disturbance. The Paymaster-general looked up. Melville demanded his wages. The captain laughed, and taking a long inspiration of smoke, removed his cigar, and sat sideways looking at Melville, letting the vapour slowly wriggle and spiralise out of his mouth.

"Captain Riga," said Melville, "do you not remember that about four months ago, my friend Mr. Jones and myself had an interview with you in this very cabin; when it was agreed that I was to go out in your ship, and receive three dollars per month for my services? Well, Captain Riga, I have gone out with you, and returned; and now, sir, I'll thank you for my pay."

"Ah, yes, I remember," said the captain. "Mr. Jones! Ha! Ha! I remember Mr. Jones: a very gentlemanly gentleman; and stop-you, too, are the son of a wealthy French, importer; and let me think-was not your great-uncle a barber?"

"No!" thundered Melville, his Gansevoort temper up.

Captain Riga suavely turned over his accounts. "Hum, hum!-yes, here it is: Wellingborough Redburn, at three dollars a month. Say four months, that's twelve dollars: less

three dollars advanced in Liverpool-that makes it nine dollars; less three hammers and two scrapers lost overboardthat brings it to four dollars and a quarter. I owe you four dollars and a quarter, I believe, young gentleman?"

"So it seems," said Melville with staring eyes.

"And now let me see what you owe me, and then we'll be able to square the yards, Monsieur Redburn.”

"Owe him!"-Melville confesses to thinking; “what do I owe him but a grudge." But Melville concealed his resentment. Presently Captain Riga said: "By running away from the ship in Liverpool, you forfeited your wages, which amount to twelve dollars; and there has been advanced to you, in money, hammers and scrapers, seven dollars and seventy-five cents; you are therefore indebted to me for precisely that sum. I'll thank you for the money." He extended his open palm across the desk.

The precise nature of Melville's eloquence at this juncture of his career has not been recorded. Penniless, he left the ship, to trail after his shipmates as they withdrew along the wharf to stop at a sailors' retreat, poetically denominated "The Flashes." Here they all came to anchor before the bar.

"Well, maties," said one of them, at last-"I s'pose we shan't see each other again:-come, let's splice the mainbrace all round, and drink to the last voyage."

And so they did. Then they shook hands all round, three times three, and disappeared in couples through the several doorways.

Melville stood on the corner in front of "The Flashes" till the last of his shipmates was out of sight. Then he walked down to the Battery, and within a stone's throw of the place of his birth, sat on one of the benches, under the summer shade of the trees. It was a quiet, beautiful scene, he says; full of promenading ladies and gentlemen; and through the fresh and bright foliage he looked out over the bay, varied with glancing ships. "It would be a pretty fine world," he thought, "if I only had a little money to enjoy it." He leaves it ambiguous whether or not be imbibed his optimism at "The Flashes." Equally veiled does he leave the mystery by which

he came by the money to pay his passage on the steamboat up to Albany: a trip he took that afternoon. "I pass over the reception I met with at home; how I plunged into embraces, long and loving," he says:-"I pass over this."

For the home we return to, is never the home that we leave, and the more desperate the leave-taking, the more bathetic the return.

CHAPTER VI

PEDAGOGY, PUGILISM AND LETTERS

"It is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthly rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dulness and common-place is first brought to light. Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but he is like the occupant of a dwelling, whose refuse cannot be clapped into his own cellar, but must be deposited in the street before his own door, for the public functionaries to take care of."

-HERMAN MELVILLE: Pierre.

THE record of the next three and a half years of Melville's life is extremely scant. What he was doing and thinking and feeling must be left almost completely to surmise. In the brief record of his life preserved in the Commonplace Book of his wife, this period between Liverpool and the South Seas is dismissed in a single sentence: "Taught school at intervals in Pittsfield and in Greenbush (now East Albany) N. Y." Arthur Stedman (who got his facts largely from Mrs. Melville), in his "Biographical and Critical Introduction" to Typee, slightly enlarges upon this statement. "A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840," says Stedman, "was occupied with school teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now East Albany, N. Y., he received the munificent salary of 'six dollars a quarter and board.' He taught for one term at Pittsfield, Mass., 'boarding around' with the families of his pupils, in true American fashion, and early suppressing, on one memorable occasion, the efforts of his larger scholars to inaugurate a rebellion by physical force." J. E. A. Smith, in his Biographical Sketch already cited, dates this "memorable" mating of pedagogy and pugilism somewhat earlier.

Besides teaching during these years, Melville was engaged in another activity, which all of his biographers-if they knew of it at all-pass over in decent silence: an activity to which Melville devotes a whole book of Pierre.

"It still remains to be said," says Melville, "that Pierre himself had written many a fugitive thing, which had brought him not only vast credit and compliments from his more immediate acquaintances, but the less partial applauses of the always intelligent and extremely discriminating public. In short, Pierre had frequently done that which many other boys have done― published. Not in the imposing form of a book, but in the more modest and becoming way of occasional contributions to magazines and other polite periodicals. Not only the public had applauded his gemmed little sketches of thought and fancy; but the high and mighty Campbell clan of editors of all sorts had bestowed upon them those generous commendations which, with one instantaneous glance, they had immediately perceived was his due. . . . One, after endorsingly quoting that sapient, suppressed maxim of Dr. Goldsmith's, which asserts that whatever is new is false, went on to apply it to the excellent productions before him; concluding with this: 'He has translated the unruffled gentleman from the drawing-room into the general levee of letters; he never permits himself to astonish; is never betrayed into anything coarse or new; as assured that whatever astonishes is vulgar, and whatever is new must be crude. Yes, it is the glory of this admirable young author, that vulgarity and vigour-two inseparable adjuncts—are equally removed from him.'"

In Pierre, Melville spends more than twenty-five closely printed pages-half satirical, half of the utmost seriousnessdiscussing his own literary growth: a passage of the highest critical and biographical interest. In its satirical parts the passage is consistently double-edged; therein, Melville ironically praises his early writing for possessing those very defects which his maturer work was damned for not exhibiting. It is doubtless true that his juvenile works were “equally removed from vulgarity and vigour." They were "characterised throughout by Perfect Taste," as he makes one critic observe "in an ungovernable burst of admiring fury." But the Perfect Taste was the Perfect Taste of Hannah More, and Dr. Akenside, and Lalla Rookh. With the publication of Typee, Melville was charged not only with the crimes of vul