ere were three masked murderers of the second watch bending at the
same instant over the sleeping form of a cabin-boy, who had been heard
to mutter, a week previously, that he had "Gold! gold!" the accumulation
of eighty--yes, eighty--years' piracy on the high seas, while sitting as
M.P. for the borough of Zaccheus-cum-Down, and attending church
regularly. I saw the captain of the foretop surrounded by suitors for
his hand, while he was himself fingering the edge of a packing-case, and
singing an amorous ditty to a lady-love shaving at a mirror.

Our diction consisted, in about equal parts, of classical allusion,
quotation from the stable, simper from the scullery, cant from the
clubs, and the technical slang of heraldry. We boasted much of ancestry,
and admired the whiteness of our hands whenever the skin was visible
through a fault in the grease and tar. Next to love, the vegetable
kingdom, murder, arson, adultery and ritual, we talked most of art. The
wooden figure-head of the _Camel_, representing a Guinea nigger
detecting a bad smell, and the monochrome picture of two back-broken
dolphins on the stern, acquired a new importance. The Dutchman had
destroyed the nose of the one by kicking his toes against it, and the
other was nearly obliterated by the slops of the cook; but each had its
daily pilgrimage, and each constantly developed occult beauties of
design and subtle excellences of execution. On the whole we were greatly
altered; and if the supply of contemporary fiction had been equal to the
demand, the _Camel_, I fear, would not have been strong enough to
contain the moral and aesthetic forces fired by the maceration of the
brains of authors in the gastric juices of sailors.

Having now got the ship's literature off his mind into ours, the captain
went on deck for the first time since leaving port. We were still
steering the same course, and, taking his first observation of the sun,
the captain discovered that we were in latitude 83 deg. south. The heat was
insufferable; the air was like the breath of a furnace within a furnace.
The sea steamed like a boiling cauldron, and in the vapor our bodies
were temptingly parboiled--our ultimate meal was preparing. Warped by
the sun, the ship held both ends high out of the water; the deck of the
forecastle was an inclined plane, on which the bullock labored at a
disadvantage; but the bowsprit was now vertical and the Dutchman's
tenure precarious. A thermometer hung agains