"Why don't you take a look round yourself?" cried the butcher.
"Of course I will. Thus!" exclaimed the carpenter, "does conscience make cowards of ye all." Having delivered himself of the quotation, he took a hasty glance through the little square hole that acted as a window in the back part of the galley, and said there was nothing. "I knew that," said the cook. "That is why I did not take the trouble to look; but this is a grievous waste of precious time." "Well, my lads," the carpenter continued, ignoring the fact that the cook was, as the saying is, in possession of the house, or rather, galley. "First and foremost we must seize this old craft, run her ashore, break her up, and build a spic and span new one, upon entirely new lines. We will take a hint here and a hint there. In such a thing our friend Jonathan would not be a bad man to go by. Then we will board the old ship alongside, and make her disgorge, for the general good, some of her accumulated plunder. She is worth a pretty plum I can tell you. Been hoarding up for ages, and yet she is always crying out poverty. Bah! there must be something wrong somewhere, or where does all the money go? She does not apparently give too much of it amongst the poorer part of her crew; but as she renders no accounts we are all in the dark, my lads. It is a busy buzzing hive of drones, though."
"As you say, Master Chips," said the cook. "She does not seem to give much of her stored up wealth to her poor brethren, and Heaven knows that the priestly gabardine too often covers an empty stomach, while others amongst them lead the lives of a Dives. Does poverty and penury find clothing or food out of her riches? Not a bit of it. Too many of her crew, are they not proud? Have they not made an exclusive and an aristocratic high-cast priesthood of themselves?"
"So wags the world, my mates; so wags the world," cried the carpenter. "While one suffers from repletion, another starves. But that old Hulk is now out of date, and she will cut up well you may be sure. Having plundered her, and given every ecclesiastical dog a bone—no offence to the sacred calling—we will bore a hole in her and let her sink. Then, when we are well across the bridge that connects her with this old craft, Chisel, my mate, shall saw the bridge through, and thus lay a trap for the rats; let them either sink or swim."
"Rats, they say," remarked the cook, as he handled his three-pronged toasting-fork, "always leave a sinking ship, and the ecclesiastical rat will prove, I expect, no exception to the rule."
"Honest Pepper!" cried the carpenter, "you speak, as you always do, like a book."
"I've some doubt on my mind, which I should like cleared up before we go any further," said the butcher.
"Out with it, Billy, my man, out with it," exclaimed the carpenter. "Your chest is big, but no doubt it will be the better for being lightened, and an empty house is better than a bad tenant, any day of the week."
"Well, you talked about running this craft ashore, and then turning your attention to the Church Hulk; but if you do that, what is the use of sawing the bridge in two. The bridge would be the plank we should have to walk; with nothing but a drop of some fathoms deep into the pit we had dug for ourselves."
"Or rather the water, Billy," said the cook, who loved his joke.