"Now they're walking round," said the Skipper, nodding his head. "Now she feels it."
When we met thus, between the hours of nine and midnight, as was our irregular habit, the talk first was always desultory, and about our own ship and our own circumstances, for the concerns of our little world strangely occupied our minds, as you would think, and the large affairs of that great world we had left, of which we heard now no sound nor rumour, had lessened in the mind, faded and vanished, all the huge consequence and loud clangour of it, so that now there was an empty horizon astern, and nothing between us and that void but a few gulls, like small and pursuing recollections. Our little microcosm, afloat and sundered in the wastes, was occupied in its own polity. We talked of the carpenter's bad leg; complained of the cook's bread; heard that Tinker the dog, being young, had the habit at night, while honest folk slept, of eating the saloon mats; grumbled that the ship's tobacco was mouldy. The deck was getting dry, the Skipper said, and now we could get the men chipping it, and then it could be tarred.
"That donkeyman," said the Skipper, "that man wastes the fresh water. I'll have a lock put on the pump handle. He works it as if we were laid out to the main. I spoke to him about it this morning." The fresh water is a vital affair with us. We may not drink the water of the country to which we are bound, so eighty tons of Welsh mountain spring is in our cleansed and whitewashed tanks. Woe to the man caught overflowing his can, if an officer sees him. "The handle can't be locked," said the Chief, "because it's next to the galley. The cook wants it all day long."
"Well, let me catch anyone wasting it. We'd look all right with a lot of dysentery, drinking that river water out there."
This common meeting-place of ours, the Chief's cabin, is on a highway of the ship, being on the direct route from the poop to the bridge, and so it is a hostel, for the Chief is a kindly and popular man, big and robust in body and mind; though he has a knack, at odd and unexpected times, of being candid in a way that shocks, treading on corns without ruth, the Skipper's particularly, when their two departments are at a difference.