its. Before
touching the powder-barrels we put a lighted candle into the bull's eye
lamp over the door and removed the lanthorn to a safe distance. Tassard
was perfectly well acquainted with the contents of this storeroom, and
on my asking for the matches put his hand on one of several bags of
them. They varied in length, some being six inches and some making a big
coil. There was nothing for it but to sample and test them, and this I
told Tassard could be done that evening. The main hatch was just forward
of the gun-room bulkhead; we seized a handspike apiece and went to work
to prize the cover open. It was desperate tough labour; as bad as trying
to open an oyster with a soft blade. The Frenchman broke out into many
strange old-fashioned oaths in his own tongue, imagining the hatch to be
frozen; but though I don't doubt the frost had something to do with it,
its obstinacy was mainly owing to time, that had soldered it, so to
speak, with the stubbornness that eight-and-forty years will communicate
to a fixture which ice has cherished and kept sound.

We got the hatch open at last--be pleased to know that I am speaking of
the hatch in the lower deck, for there was another immediately over it
on the upper or main deck--and returning to the powder-room rolled the
barrels forward ready for slinging and hoisting away when we should have
rigged a tackle aloft. We had not done much, but what we had done had
eaten far into the afternoon.

"I am tired and hungry and thirsty," said the Frenchman. "Let us knock
off. We have made good progress. No use opening the main-deck hatch
to-night: the vessel is cold enough even when hermetically corked."

"Very well," said I, bringing my watch to the lanthorn and observing
the time to be sundown: so, carefully extinguishing the candle in the
bull's-eye lamp, we took each of us a bag of matches and went to the
cook-room.

There was neither tea nor coffee in the ship. I so pined for these
soothing drinks that I would have given all the wine in the vessel for a
few pounds of either one of them. A senseless, ungracious yearning,
indeed, in the face of the plenty that was aboard! but it was the
plenty, perhaps, that provoked it. There was chocolate, which the
Frenchman frothed and drank with hearty enjoyment; he also devoured
handfuls of _succades_, which he would wash down with wine. These things
made me sick, and for drink I was forced upon the spirits and wine, the
latter of which was so