About this period Wilson culminated. Ever since leaving Bear Island he had been keeping a carnival of grief in the pantry, until the cook became almost half-witted by reason of his Jeremiads. Yet I must not give you the impression that the poor fellow was the least wanting in PLUCK—far from it. Surely it requires the highest order of courage to anticipate every species of disaster every moment of the day, and yet to meet the impending fate like a man—as he did. Was it his fault that fate was not equally ready to meet him? HIS share of the business was always done: he was ever prepared for the worst; but the most critical circumstances never disturbed the gravity of his carriage, and the fact of our being destined to go to the bottom before tea-time would not have caused him to lay out the dinner-table a whit less symmetrically. Still, I own, the style of his service was slightly depressing. He laid out my clean shirt of a morning as if it had been a shroud; and cleaned my boots as though for a man ON HIS LAST LEGS. The fact is, he was imaginative and atrabilious,—contemplating life through a medium of the colour of his own complexion.
This was the cheerful kind of report he used invariably to bring me of a morning. Coming to the side of my cot with the air of a man announcing the stroke of doomsday, he used to say, or rather, TOLL—
"Seven o'clock, my Lord!"
"Very well; how's the wind?"
"Dead ahead, my Lord—DEAD!"
"How many points is she off her course?"
"Four points, my Lord—full four points!" (Four points being as much as she could be.)
"Is it pretty clear? eh! Wilson?"
"—Can't see your hand, my Lord!—can't see your hand!"
"Much ice in sight?"