"Here, sir."
"What howling is that—Whose pig's dead, Lennox?"
"It's Mr Brail singing, sir."
"Singing!—singing!—and is it singing he calls it?"
CHAPTER IX.
FOUNDERING OF THE HERMES.
I was dreaming of the party I had so recently left, and again I was confabulating with the mild placid women, and the fair child was also there. Oh, who can appreciate the delights of female society like the poor devil who has been condemned, month after month, to the gruff society of great he men on shipboard, and whose horizon has during all that time been the distant meeting of sea and sky! "Hillo, Brail, my boy—Brail."
"What is that—who the deuce hails so uproariously?" quoth I, more than half asleep; "why, what is the matter?"
"Oh, not a great deal," rejoined Donovan, from his berth at the opposite side of the small cabin; "only you snore so confoundedly loud that I could get no sleep for your trumpetings, Benjie; and as you spoiled my rest very sufficiently last night, I thought I would take the liberty of paying you off in the morning. But, Benjie, heard you ever any thing like that?"