So in the morning, jacket in hand, I repaired to the First Lieutenant, and related the narrow escape I had had during the night. I enlarged upon the general perils I ran in being taken for a ghost, and earnestly besought him to relax his commands for once, and give me an order on Brush, the captain of the paint-room, for some black paint, that my jacket might be painted of that colour.
“Just look at it, sir,” I added, holding it lip; “did you ever see anything whiter? Consider how it shines of a night, like a bit of the Milky Way. A little paint, sir, you cannot refuse.”
“The ship has no paint to spare,” he said; “you must get along without it.”
“Sir, every rain gives me a soaking; Cape Horn is at hand—six brushes-full would make it waterproof; and no longer would I be in peril of my life!”
“Can’t help it, sir; depart!”
I fear it will not be well with me in the end; for if my own sins are to be forgiven only as I forgive that hard-hearted and unimpressible First Lieutenant, then pardon there is none for me.
What! when but one dab of paint would make a man of a ghost, and it Mackintosh of a herring-net—to refuse it I am full. I can say no more.
CHAPTER XX.
HOW THEY SLEEP IN A MAN-OF-WAR.
No more of my luckless jacket for a while; let me speak of my hammock, and the tribulations I endured therefrom.
Give me plenty of room to swing it in; let me swing it between two date-trees on an Arabian plain; or extend it diagonally from Moorish pillar to pillar, in the open marble Court of the Lions in Granada’s Alhambra: let me swing it on a high bluff of the Mississippi—one swing in the pure ether for every swing over the green grass; or let me oscillate in it beneath the cool dome of St. Peter’s; or drop me in it, as in a balloon, from the zenith, with the whole firmament to rock and expatiate in; and I would not exchange my coarse canvas hammock for the grand state-bed, like a stately coach-and-four, in which they tuck in a king when he passes a night at Blenheim Castle.