Then followed, as the big burly man recovered his breath, a startling volley of words—expletives and sea terms, in which he denounced the gang of men aloft as sea-cooks and lubbers, and threatened divers punishments and penalties for their carelessness.
Then he turned to another man who was bigger, burlier, redder, and browner, especially about the nose, and made certain exceedingly impolite inquiries as to what he was about, to allow the owner’s tackle to be smashed about in that fashion. To which the bigger and browner man growled out a retort that he’d nothing to do with the gang, as things hadn’t been handed over to him yet. And then he grew frantic too, and kicked the fallen yard, and yelled up to the riggers that the said piece of wood was sprung, that they’d have to get another yard, for he wasn’t going to sea with a main-top-galn’sl-yard fished and spliced.
Meantime the first brown man had turned to the two lads, and cooling down, nodded to them.
“Come on board then, eh?”
“Yes, sir—yes, sir.”
“Lucky for you that you both hopped out of the way, youngsters, or I should have had to send one of you back home with a hole through him, and t’other broke in half.”
I was the boy who would have been sent home with a hole through him—I the boy who write this—and the other boy who would have been broken in half, was one whom I had encountered at the dock-gates, where we had both arrived together, that miserable, mizzly morning, in four-wheeled cabs with our sea-chests on the top, and both in mortal dread—and yet somehow hopeful—that we should be too late, and that the good ship Burgh Castle had sailed.
I had been very anxious to go to sea. I loved it, and all through the preparations I was eagerness itself; but somehow, when it came to the morning that I started from the hotel where I had slept for the one night in London, a curious feeling of despondency came over me, a feeling which grew worse as I passed through the city, and then along the water-side streets, where there were shops displaying tarpaulins, canvas, and ropes; others dealing in ships’ stores; and again others whose windows glittered with compass, sextant, and patent logs, not wooden, but brass.
Perhaps it was seeing all this through the steamy, misty rain.
“What a while he is!” I said to myself, “and what a dismal place!”