"Well said, my worthy scholar. 'Tis high time we bowled ahead with my eddication as a proper gentleman."
Jack began to conjugate _amo_, _amas_, _amat_, and the pupil droned it after him but the verb _to love_ recalled a black-eyed lass who had stolen his heart in the Azores and he veered from the Latin lesson to confide that sentimental passage. So Jack hammered nouns of the first declension into him until they grew tired of that, and then the sea waif played his part by reciting such fo'castle ballads as "_Neptune's Raging Fury_; _or The Gallant Seaman's Sufferings_," and "_Sir Walter Raleigh Sailing in the Lowlands_."
This was better than the slow agony of waiting in silence, but Joe spoiled it by turning lovelorn and Jack bemourned fair Dorothy Stuart of Charles Town whom he would never greet again, and they sang very softly together a verse of "_The Maid's Lamentation_" which went like this:
"There shall be no Scarf go on my Head, No Comb into my Hair, No Fire burn, no Candle light To shew my Beauty fair, For never will I married be Until the Day I die, Since the Seas and the Winds Has parted my Love and me."
This left them really in worse spirits than before, and they drowsed off to sleep, and no wonder, after such a night as they had passed. Accustomed to broken watches, Joe Hawkridge slept uneasily with one ear open. Once or twice he sat up, heard Jack's steady snores, and lay down again. It was the ship's bell which finally brought him to, and he counted the strokes.
"Five bells, but what watch is it?" he muttered anxiously. "How long was I napping? Lost track o' the time, so I have, and can't say if it's night or day."
He sat blinking into the darkness and then had an inspiration. So staunch and well-kept was the brig that the deck seams were tight and no light filtered through. Joe left his hiding-place and groped along to where he thought the main hatch ought to be. Gazing upward he saw a gleam like a silvered line between the coaming and the edge of the canvas cover which was battened with iron bars. This persuaded him that the day had not yet faded, and he concluded that he had heard the bell strike either in the afternoon watch or the second dog watch of early evening.