ok; and
round about the vessel, far as the mariners on the decks can pierce into
the gloom, they press upon her, forcing each other down and starting up,
and rushing forward from afar, in dreadful curiosity. High over her
they break; and round her surge and roar; and giving place to others,
moaningly depart, and dash themselves to fragments in their baffled
anger. Still she comes onward bravely. And though the eager multitude
crowd thick and fast upon her all the night, and dawn of day discovers
the untiring train yet bearing down upon the ship in an eternity of
troubled water, onward she comes, with dim lights burning in her hull,
and people there, asleep; as if no deadly element were peering in at
every seam and chink, and no drowned seaman's grave, with but a plank to
cover it, were yawning in the unfathomable depths below.

Among these sleeping voyagers were Martin and Mark Tapley, who, rocked
into a heavy drowsiness by the unaccustomed motion, were as insensible
to the foul air in which they lay, as to the uproar without. It was
broad day when the latter awoke with a dim idea that he was dreaming
of having gone to sleep in a four-post bedstead which had turned bottom
upwards in the course of the night. There was more reason in this too,
than in the roasting of eggs; for the first objects Mr Tapley recognized
when he opened his eyes were his own heels--looking down to him, as he
afterwards observed, from a nearly perpendicular elevation.

'Well!' said Mark, getting himself into a sitting posture, after various
ineffectual struggles with the rolling of the ship. 'This is the first
time as ever I stood on my head all night.'

'You shouldn't go to sleep upon the ground with your head to leeward
then,' growled a man in one of the berths.

'With my head to WHERE?' asked Mark.

The man repeated his previous sentiment.

'No, I won't another time,' said Mark, 'when I know whereabouts on the
map that country is. In the meanwhile I can give you a better piece of
advice. Don't you nor any other friend of mine never go to sleep with
his head in a ship any more.'

The man gave a grunt of discontented acquiescence, turned over in his
berth, and drew his blanket over his head.

'--For,' said Mr Tapley, pursuing the theme by way of soliloquy in a low
tone of voice; 'the sea is as nonsensical a thing as any going. It never
knows what to do with itself. It hasn't got no employment for its
mind, and is always in a state of va