I found that my
toilet was, if possible, shorter than at Snuffy's in winter.

"We puts hon our togs fust, and takes our shower-baths harterwards," the
boatswain humorously explained, as he saw me trying to get the very
awkward collar of my "slops" tidy as I followed with the crowd.

The boatswain was a curious old fellow. He was born in London, "within
sound of Bow bells," as he told me; but though a Cockney by birth, he
could hardly be called a native of anywhere but the world at large. He
had sailed in all seas, and seemed to have tried his hand at most
trades. He had at one time been a sort of man-of-all-work in a boys'
school, and I think it was partly from this, and partly out of
opposition to the sail-maker, that he never seemed to grudge my not
having been born a poor person, or to fancy I gave myself airs (which I
never did), or to take a pleasure in making me feel the roughest edge of
the menial work I had to do, like so many of the men. But he knew very
well just where things did feel strangest and hardest to me, and showed
that he knew it by many a bit of not unkindly chaff.

His joke about the shower-bath came very strictly true to me. We were
all on the main deck, bare-armed and bare-legged, mopping and slopping
and swabbing about in the cold sea-water, which was liberally supplied
to us by the steam-pump and hose. I had been furnished with a _squeegee_
(a sort of scraper made of india-rubber at the end of broom-stick), and
was putting as much "elbow-grease" into my work as renewed sea-sickness
left me strength for, when the boatswain's mate turned the hose upon me
once more. I happened to be standing rather loosely, and my thoughts had
flown home on the wings of a wonder what Martha would think of this way
of scrubbing a floor--all wedded as the domestic mind is to hairy
flannel and sticky soap and swollen knees,--when the stream of sea-water
came in full force against my neck, and I and my squeegee went
head-over-heels into the lee scuppers. It was the boatswain himself who
picked me out, and who avenged me on his subordinate by a round of abuse
which it was barely possible to follow, so mixed were the metaphors, and
so cosmopolitan the slang.

On the whole I got on pretty well that day, and began to get accustomed
to the motion of the ship, in spite of the fact that she rolled more
than on the day before. The sky and sea were grey enough when we were
swabbing the decks in the early morning; as the da