About a fathom from them, there was another group squatted on the deck, consisting of Corporal Lennox, old Clinker the master at arms, Dogvane the quartermaster, and no smaller a personage than Serjeant Quacco.
The food was peas-soup, and salt junk and biscuit. The hands, as we turned and returned, seemed exceedingly comfortable and happy; when all at once, the old cook pressed his hands on the pit of his stomach, and began to make a variety of rather odd grimaces. Dogvane looked in his face, and instantly seemed to catch the infection; so he next began to screw himself up into a variety of indescribable contortions. Serjeant Quacco looked first at one, and then at another, as they groaned in any thing but a melodious concert, until he too, through sympathy, or in reality from pain, began also to twist himself about, and to make such hideous faces, that to have trusted him near a respectable pig in the family way, would have been as much as the nine farrow were worth.
At length the contagion became general apparently, and Corporal Lennox began to groan and wince, as he ejaculated, "Oh dear, what can this be! what an awful pain in my stomach! Why, Mr Drainings, what have you clapt into that peas-soup? Something bye common you must have put into it, for we are all dying here with"——
"My eye!" said old Drainings, speaking slowly and deliberately, as if the paroxysm had subsided, and some strange light had suddenly flashed on him, "you are quite right, Lennox. That same peas-soup is none of the right sort—that is clear now. I have just been telling Mr Wadding that a wery-most-remarkable circumstance took place in the boiling on't."
Here the old fellow, who had just finished his peas-soup, very solemnly looked upwards, and wiped his muzzle with what hovered between a pocket-handkerchief and a dishclout, of any colour but that of unsunned snow.
"Why," continued the cook, "just when it began to simmer about the edges of the boiler——Ah—ah—oh—there it is again—there it is again," and once more he began to tumble about on the deck, giving friend Quacco several miscellaneous kicks and punches during his make-believe involuntary convulsions. This fit seemed also to pass over.
"Why," said he, "just when the soup began to simmer about the edges of the copper, and thin streaks of white froth began to shoot inwards towards the middle, where the hot soup was whirling round in a bubbling eddy, and poppling up for all the world like the sea on the bar there, I saw—I saw"——Here he looked unutterable things with his one eye, turning it up like a duck in thunder.
"What did you see?" said old Clinker, staring in his face with sham earnestness.
"I saw—so sure as I see Mr Weevil the purser's d—d ugly mug aft on the quarterdeck there—a small devil rise out of the boiling peas-soup in the very middle of the copper, and fly up and away over the truck like a shot—whipping the vane at the mast-head off its spindle with the bight of his tail.
"No! did you though?" said several voices.