ckness was
to drink as much of the milk punch as I could swallow.

Like another idiot, I did so.

I went again to the side of the vessel, but now the fascination of the
scene had all faded out. The restless billows were dreary, savage,
hungry and dizzying; they seemed to claw at, and tear, and wrench the
struggling ship as a group of huge lions would tease and worry a captive
dog. They distressed her and all on board by dealing a blow which would
send her reeling in one direction, but before she had swung the full
length that impulse would have sent her, catching her on the opposite
side with a stunning shock that sent her another way, only to meet
another rude buffet from still another side.

I thought we could all have stood it if the motion had been like that of
a swing-backward and forward--or even if the to and fro motion had been
complicated with a side-wise swing, but to be put through every possible
bewildering motion in the briefest space of time was more than heads of
iron and stomachs of brass could stand.

Mine were not made of such perdurable stuff.

They commenced mutinous demonstrations in regard to the milk punch.

I began wondering whether the milk was not the horrible beer swill,
stump-tail kind of which I had heard so much.

And the whisky in it; to use a vigorous Westernism, descriptive of mean
whisky, it seemed to me that I could smell the boy's feet who plowed the
corn from which it was distilled.

Then the onions I had eaten in Wilmington began to rebel, and incite the
bread, meat and coffee to gastric insurrection, and I became so utterly
wretched that life had no farther attractions.

While I was leaning over the bulwark, musing on the complete hollowness
of all earthly things, the Captain of the vessel caught hold of me
roughly, and said:

"Look here, you're just playin' the very devil a-commandin' these here
men. Why in ---- don't you stiffen up, and hump yourself around, and
make these men mind, or else belt them over the head with a capstan bar!
Now I want you to 'tend to your business. D'you understand me?"

I turned a pair of weary and hopeless eyes upon him, and started to say
that a man who would talk to one in my forlorn condition of "stiffening
up," and "belting other fellows over the head with a capstan bar," would
insult a woman dying with consumption, but I suddenly became too full for
utterance.

The milk punch, the onions, the bread, and meat and coffee tired of