He was pacing the lee quarter-deck, being in charge of the yacht, though Finn had been up and down throughout the morning, sniffing about uneasily as though he could not bear to have the picture of the little ship out of his sight too long. I called to him, and he crossed over to us slowly, as though astonished that I should want him. His face had something of a Cape Horn look, with its slewed eye and a number of warts riding the wrinkles of his weather-seasoned skin, and a mat of hair upon his throat as coarse as rope-yarns. He was no beauty certainly, yet I fancied him somehow as a good seaman; maybe for the forecastle sourness of his face and a general sulkiness of demeanour, which I have commonly found as expressing excellent sea-going principles. ‘You’re the mate, I think, Mr. Crimp?’ said I, blandly. ‘Yes, I’m the mate,’ he answered, staring from me to Miss Jennings, and speaking in a voice broken by years of bawling in heavy weather, and possibly, too, by hard drinking. ‘We’re blowing along very prettily, Mr. Crimp. If this breeze holds it cannot be long before we are out of soundings.’ ‘No, I don’t suppose it will be long,’ he answered. ‘Do you know the “Shark?”’ ‘Why, yes.’ ‘Are we going to pick her up, think you?’ ‘Well, if we gets into her wake and shoves along faster nor she, there’ll be nothin’ to stop us picking her up,’ he answered, steadily viewing Miss Jennings and myself alternately, to satisfy his mind, as I took it, that we were not quizzing him. ‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘that the captain will be testing the eyesight of the other watch presently?’ ‘Ay,’ said he, with a sort of sneer, ‘they’ll go aloft after dinner.’ ‘Isn’t it a good test?’ ‘Don’t see no use in it at all,’ he answered gruffly, sending a look aloft and following it on with an admonitory stare at the fellow at the wheel. ‘Suppose nothen had hove into view; the men ’ud be still on the yards a-watching. ’Sides, observing an object at sea depends upon where your eyes is. One chap may be looking in another direction when his mate sings out. Is that going to stand for a sign that his sight’s poor?’ ‘What do the men think?’ said I, anxious to get behind the forecastle, so to speak, for I was never to know how far knowledge of this kind might be serviceable to us later on. ‘Why, the watch has been a-grumbling and a-quarrelling over the rewards. They say ’tain’t fair. If t’other watch is to be tested on the same terms, stand by for something like a melhee, says I.’ ‘Oh, but that must be stopped,’ I exclaimed, ‘we want no “melhees” aboard the “Bride,” Mr. Crimp.’ Just then I caught sight of Captain Finn. I beckoned to him, and the mate passed over to leeward, where he fell to pacing the deck as before. I told the skipper what Crimp had said, and he burst into a laugh.