The night was a thing of perfection, on the sea. The moon rode aloft and its light danced merrily on the tips of the waves. A smart breeze pouted the sails on the “Captain Spencer” till she plowed her way like a skimming albatross through the phosphorescence of the southern field of ocean.
On deck the beef-eaters, Adam and William Phipps, with the mate and a jovial boatswain, were in high spirits. They were nearing their goal, after a run which would have awakened some sort of a rollicking devil in a deacon. Captain Phipps had felt a spell of bubbling coming upon him for days. It always did, the moment he dropped Boston out of sight, over the green, serrated edge of the riotous Atlantic. Therefore he had broken off the neck of a bottle of good, red juice, which had lain for a year in the hold of the brig, and this liquified comfort had circulated generously.
The beef-eaters, arm in arm, were now spraddling about the deck in a dance of which Terpsichore had never been guilty, even in her A B C’s of the art. The boatswain was furnishing music from a tin pipe, the one virtue of which was that it was tireless.
At length he altered the tune, or at least, so he said, and after a bar or two of the measure had lost itself in the sails and shrouds, Adam cleared his throat for a song.
“In the Northern sea I loved a maid,
As cold as a polar bear,
But of taking cold I was not afraid—
Sing too rel le roo,
And the wine is red—
For a kiss is a kiss, most anywhere,