moke from their short
brass-lidded pipes. They never attempted a song, still less to join in
the nightly dance on deck, which the others performed with such spirit,
and entered into with such a keen relish, that their limbs seemed strung
upon wires. They seldom spoke, but sat upon the deck looking on with
listless eyes, as the rest bounded past them, revelling in the very
madness of mirth.

Geordie Muckleroy, the elder of the twain, was a stout, clumsy made man,
whose head was stuck into his broad rounded shoulders, like the handle
of his body which had grown so stiff from his stolid way of thinking,
(if indeed he ever thought,) and his sedentary habits, that he seemed to
move it with great difficulty, and, in answering a question, invariably
turned his whole frame to the speaker. He had a large, flabby,
putty-coloured face, deeply marked with the small pox, from which cruel,
disfiguring malady he and his brother Jock seemed to have suffered in
common. A pair of little black meaningless eyes looked like blots in his
heavy visage; while a profusion of black, coarse hair, cut very short,
stuck up on end all over his flat head, like the bristles in a
scrubbing-brush. He certainly might have taken the prize for ugliness in
the celebrated club which the _Spectator_ has immortalized. Yet this
hideous, unintellectual looking animal had a wife, a neat,
sensible-looking woman, every way his superior, both in person and
intelligence. She was evidently some years older than her husband, and
had left a nobleman's service, in which she had been cook for a long
period, to accompany Geordie as his bride across the Atlantic. Like most
women, who late in life marry very young men, she regarded her mate as a
most superior person, and paid him very loving attentions, which he
received with the most stoical indifference, at which the rest of the
males laughed, making constant fun of Geordie and his old girl. Jock was
the counterpart of his brother in manners and disposition; but his head
was adorned with a red scrubbing-brush, instead of a black one, and his
white freckled face was half-covered with carrotty whiskers. The trio
were so poor, that after having paid their passage-money, they only
possessed among them a solitary sixpence.

The day after they reached the banks of Newfoundland, and the ship was
going pretty smartly through the water, Geordie hung his woollen jacket
over the ship's side while he performed his ablutions, and a su