ow that it won Wolf Larsen's
approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction during the brief
time my _regime_ lasted.

"The first clean bite since I come aboard," Harrison said to me at the
galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans from the forecastle.
"Somehow Tommy's grub always tastes of grease, stale grease, and I reckon
he ain't changed his shirt since he left 'Frisco."

"I know he hasn't," I answered.

"And I'll bet he sleeps in it," Harrison added.

"And you won't lose," I agreed. "The same shirt, and he hasn't had it
off once in all this time."

But three days was all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to recover from
the effects of the beating. On the fourth day, lame and sore, scarcely
able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was haled from his bunk by the
nape of the neck and set to his duty. He sniffled and wept, but Wolf
Larsen was pitiless.

"And see that you serve no more slops," was his parting injunction. "No
more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt occasionally, or you'll get
a tow over the side. Understand?"

Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a short lurch
of the _Ghost_ sent him staggering. In attempting to recover himself, he
reached for the iron railing which surrounded the stove and kept the pots
from sliding off; but he missed the railing, and his hand, with his
weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot surface. There was a sizzle
and odour of burning flesh, and a sharp cry of pain.

"Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot 'ave I done?" he wailed; sitting down in the
coal-box and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth. "W'y 'as
all this come on me? It mykes me fair sick, it does, an' I try so 'ard
to go through life 'armless an' 'urtin' nobody."

The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured cheeks, and his
face was drawn with pain. A savage expression flitted across it.

"Oh, 'ow I 'ate 'im! 'Ow I 'ate 'im!" he gritted out.

"Whom?" I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again over his
misfortunes. Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated than whom he
did not hate. For I had come to see a malignant devil in him which
impelled him to hate all the world. I sometimes thought that he hated
even himself, so grotesquely had life dealt with him, and so monstrously.
At such moments a great sympathy welled up within me, and I felt shame
that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture or pain. Life had been unfair
to him. It had p