top step of our
companion-way with three cups of boiling cocoa in his hands, slips and
thunders to the bottom. There is a chaotic mixture of scalded boy,
broken cups, and steam on the floor, and we giggle nervously in our
Turkish bath.

George the Fourth goes on watch, and we lie listlessly under our
awning, praying for a breeze. On the face of the blazing vault there
is not a single cloud, on the face of the waters not a ripple. The sea
is a vast pond of paraffin. The hot gases from the funnel rise
vertically, and the sun quivers behind them. The flaps of the windsail
hang dead, the sides of the canvas tube have fallen in like the neck
of a skinny old man. Slowly the sun mounts over our heads and the air
grows hotter and hotter. From the galley come sounds of quacking, and
a few feathers roll slowly past us. Now and then an agonized trimmer
will stagger out of a bunker hatch into the open air, his half-naked
body black with coal-dust and gleaming with sweat. The Mate, in a big
straw hat, paces the bridge slowly. The cook emerges from the galley
and hastens aft for provisions--they are preparing our Christmas
dinner. Roast duck, green peas, new potatoes, plum pudding--and the
temperature is 105 deg. Fah. on deck.

One bell. I rise, and go below to change for my watch--12 to 4.

"Will you take any dinner, sir?" John Thomas rubs the sweat from his
forehead and sets the soup on the table. I ponder on the madness of
eating Christmas fare in that oven-like mess-room, but sentiment
wins, and I sit down with the others.

"Hoondred an' twenty oonder t' win's'le," whispers George to me
huskily.

"What's the sea-water?" asks the Chief.

"Eighty-nine, sir."

We push the soup aside, and John Thomas brings in the roast ducks. How
appetizing they would be at home! The Chief wrenches them apart in
perspiring silence, and we fall to. We peck at the food; the sweat
drops from our faces into the plates, the utensils slide from our
hands, and so we make the best of it. But when the pudding arrives our
courage fails us. We _cannot_ face plum pudding, sentiment or no
sentiment. We gulp down some lime-juice and stagger away like dying
men--I to four hours' purgatory below.

Slowly (oh, so slowly!) the time drags on. The greaser draws his
tattooed arm across his eyes and whispers, with the triumph of a lost
soul bragging of the Circle of Fire, that he has known it "'otter'n
this in the Red Sea, sir." He is an entertaining man. Ofte