“The Trinidad,” the signals said this time; “for Trinidad and intermediate ports.”
CHAPTER XVII.
OVERBOARD IN THE PITCH LAKE.
THE difference between a modern mail and passenger steamer and a vessel built solely for carrying freight is so great that Kit could hardly help liking his new surroundings, much as he regretted leaving his old friend the North Cape. On the Trinidad there was a beautiful little office for the purser, in which Mr. Clark had one desk and his assistant another; and although the work was ten times as great as on the freighter, the facilities for doing it were ten times better. It was vastly more labor to make up the manifest where there were thousands of miscellaneous packages for different consignees at different ports; but it had to be written only once, for there was the copying-press ready to make as many duplicates as might be needed. Kit had never seen so many facilities before for doing good and rapid work.
And there was not more change in the office work than there was in everything else. No more “sea clothes” to be worn now, with forty or fifty passengers in the cabin, and the necessity of going into the grand saloon for every meal. It was a finer saloon than Kit had seen anywhere before, fitted up in marbles and hard woods and shining glass; and certainly the meals were far beyond anything he had dreamed of. Mr. Clark’s seat was at the head of one of the tables, and Kit’s at the foot; and he soon found that being agreeable to the passengers is an important part of the purser’s work on a large steamer. That part of the work Mr. Clark was quite willing to do himself, leaving his assistant to attend to the clerical-business; and Kit was more than willing to have it so, for he did not feel quite at home yet with so many passengers on board ship.
The voyage was no novelty to him, as he had been over precisely the same route before as far as Barbadoes. But this trip bade fair to give him a much better knowledge of the intermediate islands, for the purser told him that he was to do all the “shore work.”
“There’s no use of my roasting myself on those islands,” Mr. Clark said, “when I have a young fellow to do it for me. You are accustomed to that kind of work; you will find this almost the same as the work you have been doing. You must never let a package get away from you till somebody else becomes responsible for it and you have his receipt for it. These fellows down here would steal the tan off your face, if they didn’t have so much of their own. I have read in books that there’s a great deal of honesty in the world, but somehow it doesn’t seem to thrive around the seaports. Maybe you had a little experience of that in Marseilles.”
“I rather think I did!” Kit laughed. “But I have learned pretty well how to hold on to my goods. I don’t think they’re going to rob me much down here.”
One of the pleasures of the evening was to have Captain Fraser come into the office for a chat. In the long run between New York and St. Kitts, the first island, with fair weather and no land for hundreds of miles, the Captain had very little to do, and hardly an evening passed without a visit from him. He was a big, jolly, hearty Nova Scotian, in manner very much like Mr. Clark, Kit thought, at least in his habit of saying things with a sober face that he neither believed himself nor expected others to believe. The speed of the Trinidad was one of the things that Captain Fraser never tired of joking about. One evening Kit made some remark about the good day’s run.
“Oh, I have to hold her back,” the Captain answered. “She’s a very fast ship when we let her out, but the owners won’t stand it. Coming up about three months ago we left St. Kitts a day late, and as we had fine weather the chief engineer kept bothering me to let him make it up. So at last I got tired hearing about it and told him to let her go. Go! Well, sir, you never saw anything like it. You’ve been in a fast train on shore and seen the telegraph poles fly past? That was exactly the way the light-houses flew past all the way up the coast. We got into port two days ahead of time; but when the port captain came aboard, the first thing he said was:—