The picture was memorably impressive. I have it now bright in my mind’s eye, all the hues as gay as the shining colours in the silver plate of a daguerreotype. Nothing disturbed the stillness upon the ship but the voice of the doctor. Yes, you heard a soft, creaming noise of running waters, and at intervals a gentle flap from aloft, and sometimes there would break in a homely sound from the live-stock forward. Never had the sea looked so wide nor our ship so lovely. The feathering billows ran chasing in flashes and gleams into the south-west, where the ocean trembled in a dark blue, with a horizon firm as though ruled upon the delicate azure of the heavens. Southeast, under the sun, it was all blinding splendour—sheer dazzle that streamed to the tall, leaning weather side of the ship and broke from the bow in sudden light like molten silver.
When the doctor had recited as much of the Liturgy as he thought proper to deliver, he paused to breathe a while and drink from a glass of water which stood at his feet. He then began a sermon. He was in the midst of his discourse, to which the prisoners appeared to listen with close attention, Barney Abram occasionally nodding in approval or admiration as before, when a convict, who stood close against the barricade on the port-hand side—I mean that fore-and-aft barricade which formed the gangway alley, as I call it—tossed up his arms and in a loud, deep-chested, tragedy voice cried out:
‘I could tell a story
Would rouse thy lion-heart out of its den,
And make it rage with terrifying fury.’
The doctor stopped.
‘Silence there!’ roared a voice.
‘Who was that?’ exclaimed the doctor.
‘Thomas Garth, sir,’ responded a convict, standing near the prisoner who had broken out.
The doctor stared for a while in the direction of the man as though waiting to see if this extraordinary offence of interruption would be repeated. The convict was clear within my view; he was the tall, dark, handsome man whom I supposed, and, indeed, rightly supposed, to be the tragedian that one of the soldiers had told me was amongst the prisoners. After an interval of two or three minutes, all remaining quiet, the doctor resumed; but scarcely had he pronounced a dozen words when I saw the actor throw up his right arm, and, whilst he brandished his left fist, making the strangest, maddest faces in doing so—and at this moment I see the lunatic fire in his eyes as he rolled them along the line of us who stood at the break of the poop—he burst out: