_Afternoon!_ the word implies, that it is an after-piece, coming after the grand drama of the day; something to be taken leisurely and lazily.

But how can this be, if you dine at five?
For, after all, though Paradise Lost be a noble poem, and we men-of-war's men, no doubt, largely partake in the immortality of the immortals yet, let us candidly confess it, shipmates, that, upon the whole, our dinners are the most momentous attains of these lives we lead beneath the moon.

What were a day without a dinner?
a dinnerless day! such a day had better be a night.
Again: twelve o'clock is the natural hour for us men-of-war's men to dine, because at that hour the very time-pieces we have invented arrive at their terminus; they can get no further than twelve; when straightway they continue their old rounds again.

Doubtless, Adam and Eve dined at twelve; and the Patriarch Abraham in the midst of his cattle; and old Job with his noon mowers and reapers, in that grand plantation of Uz; and old Noah himself, in the Ark, must have gone to dinner at precisely _eight bells_ (noon), with all his floating families and farm-yards.
But though this antediluvian dinner hour is rejected by modern Commodores and Captains, it still lingers among "_the people_" under their command.

Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.
Some Commodores are very particular in seeing to it, that no man on board the ship dare to dine after his (the Commodore's,) own dessert is cleared away .-- Not even the Captain.