“Aye, and a precious fine way you have done it, too!” rejoined the ship’s corporal, whose face I could clearly see by the light of his own lantern had a broad and beaming grin on it, as he proceeded to inspect the lashings now of my hammock, the foot-end of which was still attached to its hook in the deck beam. “Why, you’ve been and activally gone and triced the poor beggar up with a bit of spunyarn. No wonder he come down all standing on his cocoanut!”
The other fellows near me had wakened up by this, and there was a good snigger all round; until the ship’s corporal, having rigged up my hammock again in the way it should have been rightly done at first, with a double turn of the lanyard round the hook, shoved me in and kindly tucked my blankets round me, before going off to complete his rounds; telling us, as he disappeared forwards in the darkness, that if we did not “keep quiet for the rest of the night we’d each get ‘four dozen’ on the quarter-deck next day, besides being spread-eagled in the weather rigging as a caution to all novices about to join the ship!”
This warning, uttered in a deep, sepulchral voice, no doubt awed most of the new boys, but it only made me laugh to myself, as I was pretty well up to such ‘barney’; and, with little dread of any penalties in store—though for that matter there was not much that could be said against me, for I certainly had not tried the strength or the softness of the ship’s planks of my own free-will—I cuddled into my hammock and went to sleep as soundly as if I were in my own old bed at home, in spite of the snoring and choking noises made in his dreams by that ugly chap Moses Reeks, who occupied the next hammock to mine.
“Whe-e-e-e-e! Who-e-o-e-o! Whe-eep!”
So the boatswain’s whistle rang out through the ship with a shrill iteration that pierced my ears in the fresh and chilly air next morning, awaking me, if possible, in even yet more startling fashion than Larrikins’ successful trick of the previous evening.
“Whee-e-ah! Whee-e-ah!”
There it was again; and, should this not be sufficient to disturb the slumbers of heavy sleepers, the sharp boatswain’s pipe was supplemented by the hoarse shouts of his ‘mates’ up and down the hatchways far and near, a very legion of voices!
“Rouse out! Rouse out! Rouse out! Show a leg.”
I really thought the nor’-east wind had brought up a great haul with the flood-tide, and that innumerable costers were calling out some strange fish in the streets round Bonfire Corner; while our white cockatoo, ‘Ally Sloper,’ was having a bit of fun with himself and mother by imitating the cry!
Presently, though, a rough shake of my hammock and the hail of one of the boatswain’s mates close by me told a different tale.