for the boats which bring off the boxes of fish. The little
boats were crashing, and leaping like hooked salmon, and grinding
against the sides of the steamer, and I could not venture to walk about
very much on that reeling iron deck. The crowd of smacksmen who came
were a very wild lot, and, as the breeze grew stronger, they were in a
hurry to get their boxes on board. Since one of the trunks of fish
weighs 80 lbs., I need hardly say that the process of using such a box
as a dumb-bell is not precisely an easy one, and, when the dumb-bell
practice has to be performed on a kind of stage which jumps like a
bucking broncho, the chances of bruises and of resulting bad language
are much increased. The bounding, wrenching, straining, stumbling mob in
the boats did not look very gentle or civilized; their attire was quite
fanciful and varied, but very filthy, and they were blowzy and tired
after their wild night of lashing rain and chill hours of labour. A
number of the younger fellows had the peculiar street Arab style of
countenance, while the older men were not of the very gentle type. In
that mad race against wind and tide, I should have expected a little of
the usual cursing and fighting from a mob which included a small
percentage of downright roughs. But a tall man, dressed in ordinary
yachtman's clothes, stood smoking on deck, and that was the present
writer. The rough Englishmen did not know that I had been used to the
company of the wildest desperadoes that live on earth. They only knew
that I came from the Mission ship, and they passed the word. Every rowdy
that came up was warned, and one poor rough, who chanced to blurt out a
very common and very nasty Billingsgate word, was silenced by a
moralist, who observed, "Cheese it. Don't cher see the Mission ship
bloke?" I watched like a cat, and I soon saw that the ordinary hurricane
curses were restrained on my account, simply because I came from the
vessel where all are welcome--bad and good. For four hours I was saluted
in all sorts of blundering, good-humoured ways by the men as they came
up. Little scraps of news are always intensely valued at sea, and it
pleased me to see how these rude, kind souls tried to interest me by
giving me scraps of information about the yacht which I had just left.
"She was a-bearing away after the Admiral, sir, when we passed her. It's
funny old weather for her, and I see old Jones a-bin and got the torps'l
off on her"--and so on. Several