Well might poor Frank, contrasting his dismal surroundings with the comfortable rooms and piping-hot breakfasts of his forsaken home, begin to think that he had made a fool of himself. But he choked down the feeling as unworthy of a man, and tried to turn his thoughts by watching the two quartermasters at the wheel, who were straining every muscle to keep the ship's head to the mountain waves that burst over the bow every moment with the shock of a battering-ram.
Breakfast came at last, but was not very satisfactory when it did. The old saying of "salt-horse and hard-tack" exactly described the food; and Frank, eating with one hand while clinging desperately to the long narrow table with the other, had quite enough to do in keeping his knife from running into his eye, and himself from going head over heels on the floor. At every plunge below the water-line the mess-room, already dim enough, became almost dark, while the faces of the men looked as green and ghastly as a band of demons in a pantomime. And, to crown all, one of Frank's neighbors suddenly sent a tremendous splash of grease right over him, coolly remarking,
"Now, Greeny, you won't get hurt if you fall overboard—ile calms the water, you know."
At which all the rest laughed, and Frank felt worse than a murderer.
Breakfast over, our hero was "told off" to go below with the firemen. Down he went, through one narrow hole after another, past deck after deck of iron grating—down, down, down—till at last, as he emerged from a dark passageway, a very startling scene burst upon him.
Along either side of a long narrow passage (the iron walls of which sloped inward overhead) gaped a row of huge furnace mouths, sending out a quivering glare of intense heat, increased by the mounds of red-hot coals that heaped the iron floor. Amid this chaos, several huge black figures, stripped to the waist, and with wet cloths around their sooty faces, were flinging coal into the furnaces, or stirring the fires with long iron rakes—now standing out gaunt and grim in the red blaze, now vanishing into the eddies of hissing steam tossed about by the stream of cold air from the funnel-like "wind-sail" serving as a ventilator.
A shovel was thrust into Frank Austin's hand, and he was set to keep the doorway clear of the coal that came tumbling into it from the bunkers where the coal-heavers were at work. In this way he labored till noon, and then, with blistered hands and aching back, crawled up the iron ladder, worn out, grimy, and half dazed, to his dinner.
But what a dinner for Christmas-day! No appetizing turkey and plum-pudding, eaten in the midst of loving faces and merry talk and laughter; nothing but coarse salt-junk and hard ship-biscuit, hastily snatched among rough, unsympathetic men, who neither knew nor cared anything about him. And as soon as the meal was over, back again to his weary toil in the coal bunker, which was fated, however, to be cut short in a way that he little expected.
For a time he worked away manfully; but the heat of the room and the monotony of his occupation combined to make him careless. Little by little his thoughts wandered away to his pleasant home beside the Hudson, and the little garden patch where he used to work, and the cozy fire, in the ashes of which he and his brothers roasted their chestnuts, and—
"Look out there!"