Well, I thought to myself, where does he think I got mine? Surely the Civil War, which started me off on both my grayness and my baldness, was honorable service! But very prudently, I kept my thoughts to myself and my mouth shut. What was the use of further inflaming him? Quietly I bent my beard over my plate and resumed operations on my salt beef, while the rest of the mess, content to let the matter drop, wisely did the same and the meal closed in a tenser silence even than it had opened.
It began to seem now as if every little thing caused trouble. That night I had a remarkable dream, and there being so little to talk about that all hands had not heard discussed a hundred times over, I sprang it on the mess after breakfast, expecting to get a good laugh out of them.
“Say, mates,” I began, “speaking of all the instruments we have to read on our meteorological observations, I had a grand dream about ’em last night. Want to hear it?”
“Guaranteed a brand-new dream, chief?” demanded Chipp. “If not, belay the story, for I dream about instruments every night now myself.”
“Don’t mind Chipp, chief. Shoot it!” encouraged the blindfolded Danenhower from the foot of the table. “I can stand it, anyway; I don’t have to read those instruments any more.”
“Oh, it’s new all right,” I assured Chipp. “Stand by then. I dreamed last night I was old Professor Louis Agassiz himself, king of the scientific world, and without a stitch of clothes on, I was going down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue on my way to the Smithsonian Institution, decked out with necklaces of hygrometers, bracelets made of thermometers, a belt like a South Sea hula-hula’s grass skirt made up of mercurial barometers, and God knows what other instruments dangling from my fingers and my toes. And there I was, dancing along through the heart of Washington with all those instruments on me clattering like castanets, offering to sell ’em to the crowd at only two cents apiece, but nobody would buy!”
Amid a gale of laughter from my messmates, I danced around my chair snapping my fingers, illustrating, then asked,
“Now, how’s that for a dream, boys?”
“I think it’s damned insulting to me and my profession, if you want my opinion!” broke in an unexpected voice.
Taken completely aback, I stopped dead in my dance and whirled about. There standing in his stateroom door, watching me, was Collins, who, never on hand for breakfast, was at that time normally sound asleep. A dead silence fell on the laughing mess.