of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was
studying the clouding sky to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely,
buried sordidly, and sinking down, down--

Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly
and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I
held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across
the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San
Francisco and the California coast. Rain-squalls were driving in
between, and I could scarcely see the fog. And this strange vessel, with
its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever leaping up and
out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely
Pacific expanse.

CHAPTER IV

What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner _Ghost_, as I strove to
fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and pain. The
cook, who was called "the doctor" by the crew, "Tommy" by the hunters,
and "Cooky" by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person. The difference worked
in my status brought about a corresponding difference in treatment from
him. Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as
domineering and bellicose. In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman
with a skin soft as a "lydy's," but only an ordinary and very worthless
cabin-boy.

He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his
behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.
Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, I was
supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal ignorance
concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy pots was a
source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him. He refused to take into
consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the things I was
accustomed to had been. This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt
toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that I hated him with
more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before.

This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the
_Ghost_, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till
later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an "'owlin'
sou'-easter." At half-past five, under his directions, I set the table
in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and then carried the tea