I thought we could all have stood it if the motion had been like that of a swing-backward and forward—or even if the to and fro motion had been complicated with a side-wise swing, but to be put through every possible bewildering motion in the briefest space of time was more than heads of iron and stomachs of brass could stand.
Mine were not made of such perdurable stuff.
They commenced mutinous demonstrations in regard to the milk punch.
I began wondering whether the milk was not the horrible beer swill, stump-tail kind of which I had heard so much.
And the whisky in it; to use a vigorous Westernism, descriptive of mean whisky, it seemed to me that I could smell the boy's feet who plowed the corn from which it was distilled.
Then the onions I had eaten in Wilmington began to rebel, and incite the bread, meat and coffee to gastric insurrection, and I became so utterly wretched that life had no farther attractions.
While I was leaning over the bulwark, musing on the complete hollowness of all earthly things, the Captain of the vessel caught hold of me roughly, and said:
“Look here, you're just playin' the very devil a-commandin' these here men. Why in —— don't you stiffen up, and hump yourself around, and make these men mind, or else belt them over the head with a capstan bar! Now I want you to 'tend to your business. D'you understand me?”
I turned a pair of weary and hopeless eyes upon him, and started to say that a man who would talk to one in my forlorn condition of “stiffening up,” and “belting other fellows over the head with a capstan bar,” would insult a woman dying with consumption, but I suddenly became too full for utterance.
The milk punch, the onions, the bread, and meat and coffee tired of fighting it out in the narrow quarters where I had stowed them, had started upwards tumultuously.