Master, let me take you a button hole lower; do you not see, Pompey is uncasing for the combat? What mean you? you will lose your reputation.
The rising sun the next day beheld the good ship Albatross, under the impulse of a very gentle breeze, gliding towards the west; the Andes, over which the sun was darting his levelled beams, were distinctly visible. The flapping of the topsails against their masts, the pattering of the reef-points, and the smoothness of the water, indicated an approaching calm.
"Go aloft, one of you," said Morton, who was the officer of the morning watch, "go aloft, and see if you can make out any sail astern of us under the land."
The seaman who obeyed this order, after _roosting_ for fifteen or twenty minutes on the main royal yard, came down and reported that he could see nothing; but that the sun shone so brightly on the water that, if any thing was within the range of sight, the reflection of the sunbeams would render it invisible. Morton could not repress a vague apprehension that there was some vessel in chace, though it would have sorely puzzled him to give his whys and wherefores. After having pointed his glass for the fiftieth time towards the eastern horizon, without seeing any thing but smooth water and the dim, blue, cloudy-looking mountains, the man at the wheel notified him that it was "eight bells," or eight o'clock. Having gone below to compare the watch in the cabin with the half-hour glass in the binnacle, he returned to the quarter-deck and called out,
The bell was struck, and one of the watch on deck, after a preliminary thumping with the large end of a handspike upon the forecastle, vociferated down the fore scuttle,
"All the starboard watch, ahoy! Rouse out there, starbowlines--show a leg or an arm!"
This last phrase designates the manner in which "turning out" of a hammock is accomplished, which hammock, a person unacquainted with such kind of sleeping accommodations, would never dream contained a live man, until one or the other of the aforementioned limbs was protruded. In a few minutes the wheel was relieved, and the crew were clustering around the galley with their tin pots, joking, and laughing, and shouting "scaldings!" as they hurried forward with their respective allowances of hot coffee.