ums had
been suddenly enlarged from their bodies and sent yelling into limbo.
The wind blew with an unendurable edge in the sting and bite of it.
The second mate and I, each with a rope girdling his waist to swing
by, stood muffled up to our noses under the lee of a square of canvas
seized to the mizzen shrouds. Presently he roared into my ear, "Sort
of a night for a pannikin of coffee, eh, Mr. Russell?" "Ay, ay, sir,"
I replied, and with that, liberating myself from the rope, I clawed my
way along the line of the hencoops--the decks sometimes sloping almost
up and down to the heavy weather _scends_ of the huge black
billows,--and descended into the midshipmen's berth. It was not the
first time I had made a cup of coffee for myself and the second mate in
the middle watch during cold weather. An old nurse who had lived in my
family for years had given me an apparatus consisting of a spirit-lamp
and a funnel-shaped contrivance of block tin, along with several pounds
of very good coffee, and with this I used to keep the second mate and
myself supplied with the real luxury of a hot and aromatic drink
during wet and frosty watches. The midshipmen's berth was a narrow
room down in the 'tween decks, bulkheaded off from the sides, fitted
with a double row of bunks, one on top of another, the lower beds
being about a foot above the deck. There were five midshipmen all
turned in and fast asleep. The others, who were on watch, were
clustered under the break of the poop for the shelter there. A lonely
one-eyed sort of slush lamp, with sputtering wick and stinking flame,
swung wearily from a blackened beam, rendering the darkness but little
more than visible. I slung my little cooking apparatus near to it,
filled the lamp with spirits of wine, put water and coffee into the
funnel, and then set fire to the arrangement. I stood close under it,
wrapped from head to foot in gleaming oilskins--looking a very bloated
little shape, I don't doubt, from the quantity of clothing I wore
under the waterproofs,--waiting for the water to boil. The seas roared
in thunder high above the scuttles to the wild and sickening dipping
of the ship's side into the trough. The humming of the gale pierced
through the decks with the sound of a crowd of bands of music in the
distance, all playing together and each one a different tune. The
midshipmen snored, and coats and smallclothes hanging from the bunk
stanchions wearily swung sprawling out and in, like bod