or two. That's what's the matter, sir,
believe me or not!"

With that the poor old chap, who was quite overcome with the exertions
he had gone through and his pent-up emotion, broke down utterly,
bursting into a regular boohoo.

"Dear me, Mr Stokes; Mr Stokes, don't give way like that," said the
skipper soothingly, patting him on the back to calm him down, being a
very good-hearted man at bottom, in spite of his strict discipline and
insistence on being "captain of his own ship," as he termed it. "Don't
give way like that, old friend! Things will come all right by-and-bye."

"O-o-h, will they?" snivelled the old chap, refusing to be comforted,
like a veritable Rachel mourning for her children. "We may possibly get
rid of the water below, but the crosshead bearings are working loose,
and I'd like to know who's going to give me a new gudgeon pin?"

"Hang your gudgeon pin!" cried the skipper irascibly, not perhaps for
the moment attaching the importance it demanded to this small but
essential part of the engines, uniting the connecting rod of the crank
shaft with the piston which he thus irreverently anathematised; and
then, struck by the comic aspect of the situation, with the waves
breaking over us and the elements in mad turmoil around us, while the
fat old chief was blubbering there like a boy about his gudgeon pin as
if bewailing some toy that had been taken from him, that he burst out
with a roar of laughter, which was so contagious that, in spite of the
gloomy outlook and our perilous surroundings, Mr Fosset and all of us
on the bridge joined in, even the quartermaster not being able to
prevent a grin from stealing over his crusty weatherbeaten face, though
the man at the wheel on board ship, when on duty, is technically
supposed to be incapable of expressing any emotion beyond such as may be
connected with the compass card and the coursing of the ship. "Wha--
wha--what's the matter with that now, old chap? One would think it was
a whale and not a gudgeon, you make such a fuss about it."

Of course the captain's joke set us all off cackling again; Mr
Spokeshave's "he-he-he" sounding out, high in the treble, above the
general cachination.

This exasperated Mr Stokes, making the old fellow quite furious.

"This is no laughing matter, Cap'en Applegarth," said he with great
dignity, standing up as erectly as he could and puffing his corpulent
figure out to such an extent that I thought he would burst. "I'