Chop, chop, chop! went the men’s knives on the baitboards as they deftly severed the frozen herring into portions for garnishing the hundreds of hooks which went to a tub of trawl. With yellow oilskins on their stalwart bodies, they stood around the quarters, singing and bantering one another—a picturesque crowd of clear-eyed, hard-muscled men. True sons of the sea! thought Donald, and he steered and listened to a ballad which one of the men was trolling:—
“The galley was as high as the handle of a broom,
For’ad of the cabin, underneath the main-boom,
It warn’t very big, an’ I hadn’t much room,
For cookin’ on th’ pine-wood dro-o-gher!
I had no room to move abaout,
When I was in, my starn stuck aout,
Th’ stove would smoke an’ make me shout—
Whoo! While cookin’ on th’ pine-wood dro-o-ogher!”
The crowd chopped bait and howled the last line with gusto—drawling the “dro-o-gher!” with all a chantey-man’s vim, until it wound up with the final verse of the cook’s troubles on the “pine-wood drogher.”