'Vanderholt,' exclaimed one of the guests, 'tell me what has become of that old sailor who used to take a month in making a pair of clews for the captain's cot, or a fancy pair of beckets for the mate's camphor-wood chest.'
'He belonged to the days of leisure,' answered Mr. Vanderholt. 'It is all for speed now, cracking on, carrying away, four months to Bombay, when in my time six months was looked upon as a good voyage.'
Captain Glew, at the invitation of Mr. Vanderholt, sat at the foot of the table.
'The lady,' said he, with an inclination of his head in the direction of the person referred to, 'was speaking just now of constancy amongst sailors. I remember some years ago being aboard a ship in a collision. The other vessel received us, and it turned out that the first seaman who sprang into the ship was the husband of the wife of the captain.'
'Lor', what a complication!' said somebody.
'The seaman who sprang was supposed to be dead?' said Mr. Vanderholt.
Captain Glew looked at him without smiling. His face, however, was not wanting in a certain arch expression.
'Sailors undergo very many more perils than are written down, or than the world wots of,' said a gentleman. 'I once met a travelling show. Part of it was a man in a cage. Nothing in this or the under world could be more frightful to see than that man. And what had happened to him? He had slept on a bale of cloves, and the cloves, by drawing all the moisture out of him, had left him a skeleton, with a heart beating under a loose coat of parchment.'
'Poor thing!' said a lady. 'And are cloves so drying? Really! How could the poor creature while away the time in a cage?'
'By showing the crowd how to make clove-hitches, I expect,' said Vanderholt.