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Updated: June 11, 2025
Men in shady, battered hats, bright sashes and braces, and white shirt sleeves, and women with handkerchiefs folded square over their heads, were cutting the grapes down, and piling them up in baskets; and a low cart drawn by two mouse-colored oxen, with enormous wide horns and gentle-looking eyes, was waiting to be loaded with baskets.
"Let each man fire as he gets the mast on his sight." A moment later the first gun fired, and the whole broadside followed in quick succession. "Down with the helm! Hard down, sheets and tacks!" The men whose duty it was to trim the sails ran to the sheets and braces.
I fancy it must be capillary attraction, or some other partially-understood force, that takes part in the matter. It is certainly neither braces nor buttons. There are, of course, some articles which from their very structure are fairly secure, such as an umbrella with the stick and ribs removed, or a shirt.
"Take the wheel," said he to me; and then followed the orders, in quick succession: "Lay aft, and man the braces see every thing clear forward, to wear ship steady ease her shiver away the main-topsail put your helm up haul in the weather fore-braces, gather in the after-yards."
It was by means of that glass that I could see how the boy fastened up his trousers with one strap and a piece of string, for he had no braces, and there were no brace buttons. Those corduroy trousers had been made for somebody else, I should say for a man, and pieces of the legs had been cut off, and the upper part came well over his back and chest.
But the demoralized first mate had so far aroused himself as to attend to the loosing of the mizzentopsail and topgallantsail; so Murphy with a little cajolery and ridicule induced the crew to sheet home and tauten the braces, then mustered them aft to the mizzentopsail halyards and asked them if they could, the whole lazy two dozen of them, masthead that yard by hand, without the aid of the capstan.
"Amen!" he said in an unsteady growl, and closed the book. "Square the yards!" thundered a voice above his head. All hands gave a jump; one or two dropped their caps; Mr. Baker looked up surprised. The master, standing on the break of the poop, pointed to the westward. "Breeze coming," he said, "Man the weather braces." Mr. Baker crammed the book hurriedly into his pocket.
The families of the tradesmen over the way are no longer within human ken; their places know them no more; ten, fifteen, and twenty guinea-lodgers fill them. At the pastry-cook's second-floor window, a Keeper is brushing Mr. Thurtell's hair thinking it his own. In the wax- chandler's attic, another Keeper is putting on Mr. Palmer's braces. In the gunsmith's nursery, a Lunatic is shaving himself.
He seems to have regarded posture-making as a peculiar attribute of genius. His figures are always in a constrained and over-studied pose: twisting about in the throes of giving birth to a great idea: filled with the divine afflatus, even to the bursting of their buttonholes and the snapping of their braces.
This would have been desirable, as the placing of the raker braces took considerable time. It was found, however, that the form was not sufficiently rigid, as it bulged at the middle section and could not be held by the trusses.
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