ung ladies, who were possibly not
very respectable but about whom I knew nothing as I had never seen them
before and never saw them again, and another young sailor who was good
at yarns. I didn't know his name. Absurd as it may seem we were all
quite happy. The policeman on the beat saw that we were, and evidently
hated to disturb us. He came past us three times, and each time asked us
very nicely to go home. Next time he repeated his request, and as he
said he would look on our doing so in the light of a personal favour to
himself, we agreed to evacuate the bank at last.

Our greatest privation at the Salthouse Lane establishment was want of
tobacco. We rarely had any of it. I remember one day, when want of
nicotine made me very sad, we went, on my suggestion, into the bag-room
and pulled out our bags and chests. My chest was what seamen call a
round-bottomed chest, _i.e._, a sailor's canvas bag. The beauty of it is
that anything wanted is always at the bottom. In turning the bag out I
found half a plug of tobacco. If we had been gold-mining and I had
struck a "pocket," or come across big nuggets we could not have been
happier. We sat in the smoking-room, and having divided the plug we had
a grand debauch. Of course we sometimes begged a pipe or two from
luckier men about the docks, but to find a real half plug was something
to gloat over.

When I had been in the Home nearly two months, and owed what seemed an
amazing amount of money, I really began to think that if I could not
ship in a steamer I must go in a wind-jammer again after all. So I
really began to hunt round in earnest, and after trying all sorts and
conditions of craft I landed on a job in the _Corona_ of Dundee. She was
a biggish composite vessel of about seventeen hundred tons register,
with that horrible thing, wire running rigging. In her I made the
acquaintance of one of her old crew, who had stayed by her in Hull
river, who told me various yarns of her behaviour at sea, and how one
man had been killed in her on her homeward passage from San Francisco.
As we got to be pals he suggested I should bring some more men if I knew
of any in want of a job. I brought along Ginger and the herring-back,
and we went to work cleaning out the limbers. It was not a nice job, for
the limbers of a ship which has been carrying wheat are, to say the
least of it, rather malodorous. We scraped the rotting black muck out
with boards and scrapers, and sent it up on deck. I