"Sometimes," Cook continues, growing pensive as the dough grows stiff, "sometimes I feel as though I could jump over the side with a ''ere goes nothink' and a bit of fire-bar in me 'ip-pocket. Same blasted work, day after day. Monday curry an' rice, fresh meat an' two veg., ''arriet lane' and spuds. Toosday, salt meat ditto. Wednesday, bully soup an' pastry. Thursday, similar. Friday, kill a pig an' clean the galley. Sat'day, ''arriet lane' an' spuds, fresh meat, two veg., an' tart. Sunday, similar with eggs an' bacon aft. What good do it do? Who's the better for it all? Not me. ''Ere goes nothink!'" He stabs the fire savagely through a rivet-hole in the door, and pushes his cauldrons about. To one who knows Cook all this is merely the safety-valve lifting. The ceaseless grind tells on the hardest soul, and you behold the result. In an hour or so he will be smiling again, and telling me how nearly he married a laundryman's daughter in Tooley Street, a favourite topic which he tries to invest with pathos. It appears that, after bidding the fair _blanchisseuse_ good-night, he chanced one evening to take a walk up and down Liverpool Street, where he fell into conversation with a girl of prepossessing appearance. Quite oblivious of the fact that Mademoiselle Soap-Suds had followed him, "just to see if he was as simple as he looked," he enjoyed himself immensely for some twenty minutes, and then ran right into her. He assures me he was "'orror-struck." Like a man, he admitted that he was conversing with "that--that there." I always like this part of the tale. His confession seems to him to have been the uttermost depths of mortal self-abnegation. Alas, the heiress of Soap-Suds Senior had no appreciation of the queenly attribute of forgiveness. She boxed his ears, and he never saw her again. "She was allus a spiteful cat," he observes pensively; "so p'raps the wash 'us 'ud ha' been dear at the price. Still, it _was_ a nice little business, an' no kid." As I raise my pot of shaving-water a huge head and shoulders fill up the upper half of the galley doorway. The mighty Norseman has come for some "crawfish legs." Like Mr. Peggotty and the crustacea he desires to consume, he has gone into hot water very black, and emerges very red. His flannel shirt only partially drapes his illuminated chest--I see the livid scar plainly. He beams upon me, and asks for a match. "Well, Donkey," says Cook, "'ow goes it?"; "Donkey" is the mighty Norseman's professional title aboard ship. "Aw reet, mon," says he with the fiendish aptitude of his race for idiom. "How is the Kuck?" "Oh, splendid. Stand out o' the way, and let me make thy daily bread." "Daily!" screams the Donkeyman. "Tell that to the marines. I have one loaf sof' bread three times a week, an' there are seven days to a week. Daily! Tell that----" "Find another ship, me man, find another ship if the _Benvenuto_ don't suit!" And the Mate passes on to the chart-house, where are many dogs.