"Drainings, my man," said Lanyard to cookey, "don't choke us, if you please. Do get some dry chips from Shavings, will you?"
"Here, Quacco, mind the fire," continued Drainings, "till I get some splinters from forward there.--Stay--Lennox, my dear boy, do get me a handful of dry chips from old Shavings, will ye?"
The Scotch corporal civilly complied; and after a little, we saw him split up a block of wood where the carpenter had been at work in the bows of the felucca, and presently he returned with a bundle of them, which Serjeant Quacco busily employed himself in poking into the fire, blowing lustily with his blubber lips all the while. When Lennox turned away, I could not help noticing, that he stuck his tongue in his cheek, and winked to one of the crew as he went below.
Presently Lanyard desired the boatswain to pipe to dinner. In place of bundling down below, according to the etiquette of the service in larger vessels, he winked, I saw, at the poor fellows breaking away forward into messes, which they contrived to screen from the view of the quarterdeck, by slewing the long yard nearly athwart ships, and loosing the sail as if to dry.
Notwithstanding all this, we could easily see what was going on forward. Close to, sat the old cook himself, with Shavings the carpenter, and Wadding the gunner, warrant officers in a small way, with a little snipe of a boy waiting on them.
About a fathom from them, there was another group squatted on the deck, consisting of Corporal Lennox, old Clinker the master at arms, Dogvane the quartermaster, and no smaller a personage than Serjeant Quacco.
The food was peas-soup, and salt junk and biscuit. The hands, as we turned and returned, seemed exceedingly comfortable and happy; when all at once, the old cook pressed his hands on the pit of his stomach, and began to make a variety of rather odd grimaces. Dogvane looked in his face, and instantly seemed to catch the infection; so he next began to screw himself up into a variety of indescribable contortions. Serjeant Quacco looked first at one, and then at another, as they groaned in any thing but a melodious concert, until he too, through sympathy, or in reality from pain, began also to twist himself about, and to make such hideous faces, that to have trusted him near a respectable pig in the family way, would have been as much as the nine farrow were worth.