"How can you be joking, such a time as this?" said John. "Here's Atwater, fast asleep! Are you, Atwater?"
"No," said the soldier, who lay sick, with his thoughts far away.
"Ellis is; ain't you, Ellis?" And Jack reached to shake his comrade. "How can you be asleep, Ned, when we're all going to the bottom?"
"Let me alone!" growled Ned.
"We are going to the bottom," said Jack,—the ship just then rolling in the trough of the sea.
"I can't help it if we are," replied Ellis, sick and stupefied; "and I don't care much. Let me go to the bottom in peace."
"O Lord! O Lord! O Lord!" moaned Jack, in despair, feeling more like praying than ever before in his life.
Tucket had a line of poetry to suit his case:—
"'And then some prayed—the first time in some years;'" he said, quoting Byron. And he proceeded with a description of a shipwreck, which was not very edifying to the unhappy Winch: "'Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell,'" etc.
"I never would have enlisted if I was such a coward as Jack," said Harris, contemptuously.