and paces
the deck during his watch much as one of those yellow hummocks goes
slumping up and down his cage. On the Atlantic, if the wind blew a gale
from the northeast, and it was cold as an English summer, he was sure to
turn out in a calico shirt and trousers, his furzy brown chest half
bare, and slippers, without stockings. But lest you might fancy this to
have chanced by defect of wardrobe, he comes out in a monstrous
pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean, when the evening is so hot that
Adam would have been glad to leave off his fig-leaves. "It's a kind o'
damp and unwholesome in these ere waters," he says, evidently regarding
the Midland Sea as a vile standing pool, in comparison with the bluff
ocean. At meals he is superb, not only for his strengths, but his
weaknesses. He has somehow or other come to think me a wag, and if I ask
him to pass the butter, detects an occult joke, and laughs as much as is
proper for a mate. For you must know that our social hierarchy on
shipboard is precise, and the second mate, were he present, would only
laugh half as much as the first. Mr. X. always combs his hair, and works
himself into a black frock-coat (on Sundays he adds a waist-coat) before
he comes to meals, sacrificing himself nobly and painfully to the social
proprieties. The second mate, on the other hand, who eats after us,
enjoys the privilege of shirt-sleeves, and is, I think, the happier man
of the two. We do not have seats above and below the salt, as in old
time, but above and below the white sugar. Mr. X. always takes brown
sugar, and it is delightful to see how he ignores the existence of
certain delicates which he considers above his grade, tipping his head
on one side with an air of abstraction so that he may seem not to deny
himself, but to omit helping himself from inadvertence, or absence of
mind. At such times he wrinkles his forehead in a peculiar manner,
inscrutable at first as a cuneiform inscription, but as easily read
after you once get the key. The sense of it is something like this: "I,
X., know my place, a height of wisdom attained by few. Whatever you may
think, I do _not_ see that currant jelly, nor that preserved grape.
Especially a kind Providence has made me blind to bowls of white sugar,
and deaf to the pop of champagne corks. It is much that a merciful
compensation gives me a sense of the dingier hue of Havana, and the
muddier gurgle of beer. Are there potted meats? My physician has ordered
m