have been disagreeable enough later in our
voyage, gave us just the time we wanted for setting things to rights on
board.

Our little twelve-foot cabin, it must be remembered, was bed-room,
sitting-room, dining-room, storeroom, and kitchen, all in one.
Everything we wanted for sleeping, reading, eating, and drinking, had to
be arranged in its proper place. The butter and candles, the soap and
cheese, the salt and sugar, the bread and onions, the oil-bottle and the
brandy-bottle, for example, had to be put in places where the motion of
the vessel could not roll them together, and where, also, we could any
of us find them at a moment's notice. Other things, not of the eatable
sort, we gave up all idea of separating. Mr. Migott and I mingled our
stock of shirts as we mingled our sympathies, our fortunes, and our
flowing punch-bowl after dinner. We both of us have our faults; but
incapability of adapting ourselves cheerfully to circumstances is not
among them. Mr. Migott, especially, is one of those rare men who could
dine politely off blubber in the company of Esquimaux, and discover the
latent social advantages of his position if he was lost in the darkness
of the North Pole.

After the arrangement of goods and chattels, came dinner (the curry
warmed up with a second course of fried onions)--then the slinging of
our hammocks by the neat hands of the Brothers Dobbs--and then the
practice of how to get into the hammocks, by Messrs. Migott and Jollins.
No landsman who has not tried the experiment can form the faintest
notion of the luxury of the sailor's swinging bed, or of the
extraordinary difficulty of getting into it for the first time. The
preliminary action is to stand with your back against the middle of your
hammock, and to hold by the edge of the canvas on either side. You then
duck your head down, throw your heels up, turn round on your back, and
let go with your hands, all at the same moment. If you succeed in doing
this, you are in the most luxurious bed that the ingenuity of man has
ever invented. If you fail, you measure your length on the floor. So
much for hammocks.

After learning how to get into bed, the writer of the present narrative
tried his hand at the composition of whisky punch, and succeeded in
imparting satisfaction to his intemperate fellow-creatures. When the
punch and the pipes accompanying it had come to an end, a pilot-boat
anchored alongside of us for the night. Once embarked on our own
e