frame, his face became
slightly convulsed, and all was over! The captain rose, and Connolly,
with a delicacy of feeling which many might not have looked for in her
situation, spread one of our clean mess table-cloths over the body. "And
is it really gone you are, my poor, dear boy!" forgetting all difference
of rank in the fulness of her heart. "Who will tell this to your mother,
and nobody here to wake you but ould Kate Connolly, and no time will
they be giving me, nor whisky--Ochon! ochon!"

But enough and to spare of this piping work. The boatswain's whistle now
called me to the gangway, to superintend the handing up, from a shore
boat alongside, a supply of the grand staples of the island--ducks and
onions. The three 'Mudians in her were characteristic samples of the
inhabitants. Their faces and skins, where exposed, were not tanned,
but absolutely burnt into a fiery-red colour by the sun. They guessed
and drawled like any buckskin from Virginia, superadding to their
accomplishments their insular peculiarity of always shutting one eye
when they spoke to you. They are all Yankees at bottom; and if they
could get their 365 _Islands_--so they call the large stones on which
they live--under weigh, they would not be long in towing them into the
Chesapeake.

The word had been passed to get six of the larboard guns and all the
shot over to the other side, to give the brig a list of a streak or
two a-starboard, so that the stage on which the carpenter and his crew
were at work over the side, stopping the shot holes above the water
line, might swing clear of the wash of the sea. I had jumped from
the nettings, where I was perched, to assist in unbolting one of the
carronade slides, when I slipped and capsized against a peg sticking
out of one of the scuppers. I took it for something else and damned
the ring-bolt incontinently. Caboose, the cook, was passing with his
mate, a Jamaica negro of the name of Johncrow, at the time. "Don't
damn the remains of your fellow-mortals, Master Cringle; that is my
leg." The cook of a man-of-war is no small beer, he is his Majesty's
warrant officer, a much bigger wig than a poor little mid, with whom
it is condescension on his part to jest.

It seems to be a sort of rule, that no old sailor who has not lost a
limb, or an eye at least, shall be eligible to the office; but as the
kind of maiming is so far circumscribed that all cooks must have two
arms, a laughable proportion of them have b