‘Think of them with raw pork only! The meat crystallised with salt, the hot sun over their heads, not a thimbleful of fresh water, the vessel going to pieces plank by plank, the horrible anguish of thirst made maddening by the mockery of the cold fountain-like sounds of that brine there flowing in the hold or washing alongside with a champagne-like seething! Oh,’ groaned I, ‘who is that home-keeping bard who speaks of the ocean as the mother of all? The mother! A tigress. Why, if old Davy Jones be the devil, Jack is right in finding an abode for him down on the ooze there. Mark how the affectionate mother of all torments its victims with a hellish refinement of cruelty before strangling them! how--if the land be near enough--she will fling them ashore, mutilated, eyeless, eaten, in horrid triumph and enjoyment of her work, that we shuddering radishes may behold and understand her power.’ ‘Cease, for God’s sake!’ roared Wilfrid; ‘you’re talking a nightmare, man! Isn’t the plain fact enough?’ he cried, picking up the broken bottle and flinging it in a kind of rage overboard, ‘why garnish?’ ‘I want to see the ocean properly interpreted,’ I cried. ‘Your poetical personifications are claptrap. Great mother, indeed! Great grandmother, Wilfrid. Mother of whales and sharks, but when it comes to man----’ ‘Oh, but this is impiety, Mr. Monson,’ cried Miss Laura, ‘it is really dangerous to talk so. One may _think_--but here we are upon the sea, you know, and that person you spoke of just now (pointing down) might with his great ears----’ ‘Now, Laura, my dear,’ broke in Wilfrid, ‘can’t we pick up a wretched bottle and read the melancholy message it contains without falling ill of fancy?’ He went to the skylight--‘Steward, some seltzer and brandy here! Your talk of that salt pork,’ he continued, coming back to us, ‘makes my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. I would give much for a little ice, d’ye know. Heigho! Big as this ocean is, I vow by the saints there’s not room enough in it for the misery there is in the world!’ with which he set off pacing the deck, though he calmed down presently over a foaming glass; but he showed so great a dislike to any reference to the bottle and its missive that, to humour him, Miss Jennings and I forbore all allusion to the incident. It was next forenoon, somewhere about the hour of eleven o’clock, that the lookout man on the topgallant yard--whom I had noticed playing for some time the polished tubes, which glanced like fire in his lifted hands as he steadied the glass against the East--suddenly bawled down with a voice of excitement, ‘Sail ho!’ Wilfrid, who was lounging on the skylight, jumped off it; I pricked up my ears; Miss Laura hollowed her gloved hands to take view of the man aloft. ‘Where away?’ cried Finn. ‘Right ahead, sir.’ ‘What do you make her out to be?’