his dish
of salt-water to purify us! Grog and girls! cried we. We vowed upon our
honour as gentlemen we had tasted grog for the first time in our lives on
board the Priscilla. How about the girls? they asked. We informed them we
knew none but girls who were ladies. Thereupon one sailor nodded, one
sent up a crow, one said the misfortune of the case lay in all girls
being such precious fine ladies; and one spoke in dreadfully blank
language, he accused us of treating the Priscilla as a tavern for the
entertainment of bad company, stating that he had helped to row me and my
associates from the shore to the ship.

'Poor Mr. Double!' says he; 'there was only one way for him to jump you
two young gentlemen out o' that snapdragon bowl you was in--or quashmire,
call it; so he 'ticed you on board wi' the bait you was swallowing, which
was making the devil serve the Lord's turn. And I'll remember that night,
for I yielded to swearing, and drank too!' The other sailors roared with
laughter.

I tipped them, not to appear offended by their suspicions. We thought
them all hypocrites, and were as much in error as if we had thought them
all honest.

Things went fairly well with the exception of the lessons in Scripture.
Our work was mere playing at sailoring, helping furl sails, haul ropes,
study charts, carry messages, and such like. Temple made his voice
shrewdly emphatic to explain to the captain that we liked the work, but
that such lessons as these out of Scripture were what the eeriest
youngsters were crammed with.

'Such lessons as these, maybe, don't have the meaning on land they get to
have on the high seas,' replied the captain: 'and those youngsters you
talk of were not called in to throw a light on passages: for I may teach
you ship's business aboard my barque, but we're all children inside the
Book.'

He groaned heartily to hear that our learning lay in the direction of
Pagan Gods and Goddesses, and heathen historians and poets; adding, it
was not new to him, and perhaps that was why the world was as it was. Nor
did he wonder, he said, at our running from studies of those filthy
writings loose upon London; it was as natural as dunghill steam. Temple
pretended he was forced by the captain's undue severity to defend Venus;
he said, I thought rather wittily, 'Sailors ought to have a respect for
her, for she was born in the middle of the sea, and she steered straight
for land, so she must have had a pretty good idea of