Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/321

 ABOUT ALL KINDS OF SHIPS

signs of land; he jawed the man at the wheel for pastime; he got out an imitation egg and kept him self in practice on his old trick of making it stand on end; now and then he hove a life-line below and fished up a sailor who was drowning on the quarter deck; the rest of his watch he gaped and yawned and stretched, and said he wouldn t make the trip again to discover six Americas. For that was the kind of natural human person Columbus was when not posing for posterity.

At noon he took the sun and ascertained that the good ship had made three hundred yards in twenty- four hours, and this enabled him to win the pool. Anybody can win the pool when nobody but himself has the privilege of straightening out the ship s run and getting it right.

The Admiral has breakfasted alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at noon he dines alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at six he sups alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at eleven p. M. he takes a night relish alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin. At none of these orgies is there any music; the ship orchestra is modern. After his final meal he returned thanks for his many blessings, a little overrating their value, perhaps, and then he laid off his silken splen dors or his gilded hardware, and turned in, in his little coffin-bunk, and blew out his flickering stencher and began to refresh his lungs with inverted sighs freighted with the rich odors of rancid oil and bilge- water. The sighs returned as snores, and then the rats and the cockroaches swarmed out in brigades and divisions and army corps and had a circus all

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