“Please, sir, which is the way?” said I, trembling.
“Go down those steps,” said he, pointing to the poop ladder, “and just over against the cuddy front there’s a black hole. Drop down it, for that’s the way.”
I at once stepped on to the main-deck, and saw a square aperture, which I was afterwards informed was called the “booby hatch.” There was a little crowd of third-class passengers standing round it, looking very wretched and melancholy, two or three of the women holding babies, who cried incessantly.
I looked into the hatch; it seemed very dark beneath, and a close, most unpleasant, but quite indescribable smell rose up through it—a sort of atmosphere of onions, yellow soap, fumes of lamp-oil, the whole tinctured with a peculiar flavour of shipboard. A short flight of perpendicular steps fell to the bottom. I was too manly to ask my way of the women; so, perceiving a sailor coiling away a rope upon a pin near the main-shrouds, I went up to him, and said, “I want my bedroom; d’ye know where it is?”
He turned his eyes slowly on me, took a somewhat sneering survey of my buttons, spat a mouthful of tobacco-juice into a scupper-hole, and then said, whilst he proceeded with his work, “Better ask the capt’n.”
The sailor was too grumpy and surly a man for a little boy like me to address a second time; so I made my way to the hatch, and put my leg over into it, concluding that I should find somebody to tell me where my bedroom was when I had descended. The ladder was perpendicular, and I was very slow in stepping down it.
“HE TURNED HIS EYES SLOWLY UPON ME.”
“Now then!” bawled a powerful voice: “up or down; one ways or t’other. There ain’t too much light here; and who’s bin and made you think you’re made o’ sheet glass?”
This remark, I found, was uttered by a seafaring man, one of the sailors of the ship, I afterwards came to know, who had been told off to help our handful of emigrants to secure their boxes. I think he was slightly in liquor; at all events, I grew sensible of a distinct taste of rum-and-water on the air as I jumped backwards on to the lower deck close beside him.