ass
windows, only about eighteen inches square, had been set in on each
side, and protected with dead-lights to fasten tight in case a heavy
surf should dash up so high, and the entire hold--where on many and many
long voyages there had been stored, in darkness, spices, coffee, sugar,
and perhaps gold and jewels--was now transformed to a schoolroom.

There was a long table and there were globes and maps, shelves of books,
and a blackboard. That schoolroom had, I am sure, none of the dulness
and repulsiveness of other schoolrooms to us. No; it rather seemed a
delightful place--an Arabian Nights' sort of study, with a romantic
salty influence pervading it to comfort us at our tasks. We could take
hold there of geography and history. Mathematics in a vessel's hold,
what was it but a foreshadowing of navigation? We felt no hostility to
Latin and Greek, for we were but reading of foreign lands and strange
people across the ocean in old times, the occurrences of which were but
storm-cast hulks like our old brig.

So low was our roof, the deck, that the crown of Walter's cap touched
it, and Mr Clare had to bend his neck when he moved about. The square,
dwarf windows looked out on nothing but jagged rocks and rolling blue
waves.

Away forward and aft our schoolroom was dark, and the distance between
decks so narrowed that we could only explore those extremes of the hold
by going on hands and knees--with the chance, too, of starting some big
rat, an old grey navigator, perhaps, who, believing firmly in "Don't
give up the ship!" could not get over his surprise at seeing his once
rolling and well-stored residence now stationary, and furnishing no
better victuals than book-leaves, chalk, and sometimes the crumbs of a
boy's lunch. I imagined the crew of old rats assembling beneath the
globes at night, when a moon streamed through the small windows; and the
captain, a surly grey fellow, with long whiskers and brown, broken
grinders, taking his place on a Greek lexicon, and then the speeches of
inquiry and indignation shrilly uttered in the mass meeting. "Long
tails!"--would commence some orator with a fierce squeak--"long tails,
long tails, I say! what in the name of all that's marine does this mean?
Cheese and spices! how things are changed. Will this craft never sail,
and our parents waiting for us in the New World over the sea! Where is
our `life on the ocean wave'? where is, I say, where `a home in the
rolling deep'?