"Then let me tell you there are countless Naval officers afloat who would reckon themselves in Paradise if they had such quarters as these to live in. Look at the Saucy! The well of a cod smack is more comfortable than her sleeping places. Take a corvette or gun-brig stationed on the West Coast of Africa, or kept cruising along the West Indian shores; the heat strikes through the plank and a man sleeps in a furnace; cockroaches in numbers thick as ropes blacken the beams, rats ferocious with thirst are found drowned in the hook pot of cold tea you want to drink. Everything simmers, the paint even below, if there is any paint to be found, bubbles, and you are fed on scalding pea soup and beef blue with brine, the very sight of which raises a craziness of thirst which you slake by rum, for[Pg 103] the cooling of which you might offer your year's pay for a piece of ice. Now, these are airy quarters. An admiral might well be content with such a living-room.",
"Whew!" he whistled, "an' all gold, too. The three pieces that Croaker took make the even three thousand.",
The Aurora's boat was swept alongside the brig, and Captain Acton and the Admiral clambered over the side up a short flight of steps, and in an instant Lucy was clasped in the devouring embrace of her father. Such an old-world scene taxes the highest gifts of the pen or the brush. This Louisa Ann was about fifty years old; she was nearly as broad as she was long. Her fore-mast was stepped far in the bows; her decks were stained and grimy; the paint had faded out of the inside of her bulwarks. Her sails were patched and so dingy that they might have been coloured as a smack's. Her rusty sides were lined with yawning seams amid which three little circular windows were merged with no accentuation from the dirt-shrouded glass which prevented the sea from entering the blistered, worn, mani-coloured hull. Her sailors looked as though[Pg 359] they were shipwrecked: long-haired, bearded, sallow, in clothes considerably tattered, in aspect melancholy and dejected with lack of nourishment, dullness of sailing and ceaseless motion: for here was the tub wallowing like a buoy in a popple upon a smooth sea, and the frightful weather she would make off Cape Horn or in a gale of wind the imagination of a sailor could readily picture by witnessing her motions now..
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