one,

Just then, my reverie was broken by the strong hand of the gruff Captain
of, the vessel descending upon my shoulder, and he said:

"See, here, youngster! Ain't you the fellow that was put in command of
these men?"

I acknowledged such to be the case.

"Well," said the Captain; "I want you to 'tend to your business and
straighten them around, so that we can clean off the decks."

I turned from the bulwark over which I had been contemplating the vasty
deep, and saw the sorriest, most woe-begone lot that the imagination can
conceive. Every mother's son was wretchedly sea-sick. They were paying
the penalty of their overfeeding in Wilmington; and every face looked as
if its owner was discovering for the first time what the real lower
depths of human misery was. They all seemed afraid they would not die;
as if they were praying for death, but feeling certain that he was going
back on them in a most shameful way.

We straightened them around a little, washed them and the decks off with
a hose, and then I started down in the hold to see how matters were with
the six hundred down there. The boys there were much sicker than those
on deck. As I lifted the hatch there rose an odor which appeared strong
enough to raise the plank itself. Every onion that had been issued to us
in Wilmington seemed to lie down there in the last stages of
decomposition. All of the seventy distinct smells which Coleridge
counted at Cologne might have been counted in any given cubic foot of
atmosphere, while the next foot would have an entirely different and
equally demonstrative "bouquet."

I recoiled, and leaned against the bulwark, but soon summoned up courage
enough to go half-way down the ladder, and shout out in as stern a tone
as I could command:

"Here, now! I want you fellows to straighten around there, right off,
and help clean up!"

They were as angry and cross as they were sick. They wanted nothing in
the world so much as the opportunity I had given them to swear at and
abuse somebody. Every one of them raised on his elbow, and shaking his
fist at me yelled out:

"O, you go to ----, you ---- ---- ----. Just come down another step,
and I'll knock the whole head off 'en you."

I did not go down any farther.

Coming back on the deck my stomach began to feel qualmish. Some wretched
idiot, whose grandfather's grave I hope the jackasses have defiled, as
the Turks would say, told me that the best preventive of sea-si