at the clock, Uncle,' said he. He would not look himself, from
horror of the tipplers.

'Him past, matey,' repeated the Hawaiian.

'So much the better for you, Uncle,' he replied; and he gave up the
wheel, repeating the directions as he had received them.

He took two steps forward and remembered his dead reckoning. 'How has
she been heading?' he thought; and he flushed from head to foot. He had
not observed or had forgotten; here was the old incompetence; the slate
must be filled up by guess. 'Never again!' he vowed to himself in silent
fury, 'never again. It shall be no fault of mine if this miscarry.' And
for the remainder of his watch, he stood close by Uncle Ned, and read
the face of the compass as perhaps he had never read a letter from his
sweetheart.

All the time, and spurring him to the more attention, song, loud talk,
fleering laughter and the occasional popping of a cork, reached his ears
from the interior of the house; and when the port watch was relieved
at midnight, Huish and the captain appeared upon the quarter-deck with
flushed faces and uneven steps, the former laden with bottles, the
latter with two tin mugs. Herrick silently passed them by. They hailed
him in thick voices, he made no answer, they cursed him for a churl,
he paid no heed although his belly quivered with disgust and rage. He
closed-to the door of the house behind him, and cast himself on a locker
in the cabin--not to sleep he thought--rather to think and to despair.
Yet he had scarce turned twice on his uneasy bed, before a drunken voice
hailed him in the ear, and he must go on deck again to stand the morning
watch.

The first evening set the model for those that were to follow. Two cases
of champagne scarce lasted the four-and-twenty hours, and almost the
whole was drunk by Huish and the captain. Huish seemed to thrive on the
excess; he was never sober, yet never wholly tipsy; the food and the sea
air had soon healed him of his disease, and he began to lay on flesh.
But with Davis things went worse. In the drooping, unbuttoned figure
that sprawled all day upon the lockers, tippling and reading novels;
in the fool who made of the evening watch a public carouse on the
quarter-deck, it would have been hard to recognise the vigorous seaman
of Papeete roads. He kept himself reasonably well in hand till he had
taken the sun and yawned and blotted through his calculations; but from
the moment he rolled up the chart, his hours were pass