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ums had been suddenly enlarged from their bodies and sent yelling into limbo. The wind blew with an unendurable edge in the sting and bite of it. The second mate and I, each with a rope girdling his waist to swing by, stood muffled up to our noses under the lee of a square of canvas seized to the mizzen shrouds. Presently he roared into my ear, "Sort of a night for a pannikin of coffee, eh, Mr. Russell?" "Ay, ay, sir," I replied, and with that, liberating myself from the rope, I clawed my way along the line of the hencoops--the decks sometimes sloping almost up and down to the heavy weather _scends_ of the huge black billows,--and descended into the midshipmen's berth. It was not the first time I had made a cup of coffee for myself and the second mate in the middle watch during cold weather. An old nurse who had lived in my family for years had given me an apparatus consisting of a spirit-lamp and a funnel-shaped contrivance of block tin, along with several pounds of very good coffee, and with this I used to keep the second mate and myself supplied with the real luxury of a hot and aromatic drink during wet and frosty watches. The midshipmen's berth was a narrow room down in the 'tween decks, bulkheaded off from the sides, fitted with a double row of bunks, one on top of another, the lower beds being about a foot above the deck. There were five midshipmen all turned in and fast asleep. The others, who were on watch, were clustered under the break of the poop for the shelter there. A lonely one-eyed sort of slush lamp, with sputtering wick and stinking flame, swung wearily from a blackened beam, rendering the darkness but little more than visible. I slung my little cooking apparatus near to it, filled the lamp with spirits of wine, put water and coffee into the funnel, and then set fire to the arrangement. I stood close under it, wrapped from head to foot in gleaming oilskins--looking a very bloated little shape, I don't doubt, from the quantity of clothing I wore under the waterproofs,--waiting for the water to boil. The seas roared in thunder high above the scuttles to the wild and sickening dipping of the ship's side into the trough. The humming of the gale pierced through the decks with the sound of a crowd of bands of music in the distance, all playing together and each one a different tune. The midshipmen snored, and coats and smallclothes hanging from the bunk stanchions wearily swung sprawling out and in, like bod
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