“Why, I mean Johnson wot wrote the diksh’nary—the great lexikragofer.”
“Oh, it’s him you mean, is it? In course I’ve knowed him ever since I wos at school.”
A general laugh interrupted the speaker.
“At school!” cried Nickel Sling, who approached the group at that moment with a carving knife in his hand—he seldom went anywhere without an instrument of office in his hand—“At school! Wal now, that beats creation. If ye wos, I’m sartin ye only larned to forgit all ye orter to have remembered. I’d take a bet now, ye wosn’t at school as long as I’ve been settin’ on this here windlass.”
“Yer about right, Sling, it ’ud be unpossible for me to be as long as you anywhere, ’cause everybody knows I’m only five fut two, whereas you’re six fut four!”
“Hear, hear!” shouted Dick Barnes—a man with a huge black beard, who the reader may perhaps remember was the first to “raise the oil.” “It’ll be long before you make another joke like that, Gurney. Come, now, give us a song, Gurney, do; there’s the cap’n’s darter standin’ by the foremast, a-waitin’ to hear ye. Give us ‘Long, long ago.’”
“Ah! that’s it, give us a song,” cried the men. “Come, there’s a good fellow.”
“Well, it’s so long ago since I sung that song, shipmates,” replied Gurney, “that I’ve bin and forgot it; but Tim Rokens knows it; where’s Rokens?”
“He’s in the watch below.”
In sea parlance, the men whose turn it is to take rest after their long watch on deck are somewhat facetiously said to belong to the “watch below.”