the odorous stew. "It vas goot, ja, and hart to leaf
ze groob; but ze sheeps cannot wait, my mans; zo doomble oop dere!
Doomble oop!"

Captain Snaggs, however, his watchful weather eye and quick intelligence
taking in everything at a glance, liked the second-mate's slowness of
speech and action as little as he relished the men's evident reluctance
at hurrying up again on deck; for, although barely a second or two had
elapsed from his first order to the crew, he grew as angry as if it had
been a "month of Sundays," his sallow face flushing with red streaks and
his sandy billy-goat beard bristling like wire, every hair on end, just
as a cat's tail swells at the sight of a strange dog in its immediate
vicinity when it puts up its back.

"Avast thaar, ye durned fule!" he screamed in his passion, dancing about
the poop and bringing his fist down with a resounding thump on the brass
rail, as if the inanimate material represented for the nonce the back of
the mate, whom he longed to belabour. "Guess one'd think ye wer coaxin'
a lot o' wummen folk to come to a prayer-meetin'! Why don't ye go down
in the fo'c's'le an' drive 'em up, if they won't come on deck when
they're hailed? Below thaar, d'ye haar?--all hands reef tops'ls!"

This shout, which the captain yelled out in a voice of thunder, finally
fetched the dawdlers on deck, first one and then another crawling up the
hatchway with lingering feet, in that half-hearted, dilatory,
aggravating way that sailors--and some shore people, too for that
matter--know well how to put on when setting to a task that runs against
their grain and which they do not relish; though they can be spry
enough, and with ten times the smartness of any landsmen, when
cheerfully disposed for the work they have in hand, or in the face of
some real emergency or imminent peril, forgetting then their past
grievances, and buckling to the job right manfully, in true `shellback'
fashion, as if many-handed, like Briareus, with every hand a dozen
fingers on it, and each finger a hook!

So it could be seen now.

The _Denver City_, a ship-rigged vessel of about thirteen hundred tons
burthen, bound from Liverpool to San Francisco with a general cargo, had
been two days out from the Mersey, battling against bad weather all the
way from the start, with a foul wind, that shifted from the west to
south-west and back again to the west, dead in her teeth, as she essayed
to shape her course down Saint George's C