e words, "Ahoy, Splinters, shift
along the gear, will you?" and then Splinters, whoever he might be, was
cursed in unchosen phrases as the son of all the lubbers that ever
crowded a fo'cas'le. A mumbled discussion seemed to tread on the heels
of the hullabaloo, when, apparently having arranged the "gear" to
satisfaction, the man stalked to the door, singing once more in
stentorian tones:

"There was a man of Boston town,
With his pistols three,
With his pistols----"

"Hullo--the darned little Jew and his kick-shaws; why, matey, so early
in the morning?"

The exclamation came as he saw us, putting his head round the door, and
showing one arm swathed all up in dirty red flannel. He was no sort of
a man to look at, as the Scots say, for his head was a mass of dirty
yellow hair, and his face did not seem to have known an ablution for a
week. But there was an ugly jocular look about his rabbit-like eyes and
a great mark cut clean into the side of his face which were a fit
decoration for the red-burnt, pitted, and horribly repulsive
countenance he betrayed. His leer, too, as he greeted Hall, was the
evil leer of a man whose laugh makes those hearing hush with the horror
of it; and, on my part, forgetting the warning, I looked at him and
drew back repelled. This he saw, and with a flush and a display of one
great stump of a tooth which protruded on his left lip, he turned on
me.

"And who may you be, matey, that you don't go for to shake hands with
Roaring John? Dip me in brine, if you was my son I'd dress you down
with a two-foot bar. Why don't you teach the little Hebrew manners, old
Josfos? but there," and this he said as he opened the door wider, "so
long as our skipper will have to do with shiners to sell and land
barnacles, what ken you look for?--walk right along here."

The room indicated opened from a small hall, for the place was built
after the Parisian fashion--akin to that of our flats--and was a house
in itself. The man who called himself "Roaring John" entered the
apartment before us, bawling at the top of his voice, "Josfos, the Jew,
and his pardner come aboard!" and then I found myself in the strangest
company and the strangest place I have ever set eyes on. So soon as I
could see things clearly through the hanging atmosphere of tobacco
smoke and heavy vapour, I made out the forms of six or eight men, not
sitting as men usually do in a place where they eat, but squatting on
their haunches b