I don't know how long I slept, but when I woke up, there was Rectus, sitting on a little bench by the state-room wall, with his feet braced against the berth. He was hard at work sucking a lemon. I turned over and looked down at him. He didn't look a bit sick. I hated to see him eating lemons.
"Don't you feel badly, Rectus?" said I.
"Oh no!" said he; "I'm all right. You ought to suck a lemon. Have one?"
I declined his offer. The idea of eating or drinking anything was intensely disagreeable to me. I wished that Rectus would put down that lemon. He did throw it away after a while, but he immediately began to cut another one.
RECTUS AND THE LEMONS.
"Rectus," said I, "you'll make yourself sick. You'd better go to bed."
"It's just the thing to stop me from being sick," said he, and at that minute the vessel gave her stern a great toss over sideways, which sent Rectus off his seat, head foremost into the wash-stand. I was glad to see it. I would have been glad of almost anything that stopped that lemon business.
But it didn't stop it; and he only picked himself up, and sat down again, his lemon at his mouth.
"Rectus!" I cried, leaning out of my berth. "Put down that lemon and go to bed!"