They argue, too, about the most trivial affairs, during which the skipper all but blows the skylights off with his hurricane voice. Later on, at dinner to-day, they quarrelled about the position of a certain San Francisco restaurant. The old man swore that it wasn’t on Polk Street. Then they went at each other quite savagely, but gradually calmed down, and we thought it was all over, when suddenly the skipper hammered on the table with his fist, and shouted, “That restaurant’s no more on Polk Street than this huckleberry pie’s a blueberry; I mean raspberry.” And he was so vexed at his simple little mistake that he thundered at the boy Sammie, who stands shuddering in the pantry during meals, “You, Sam, get some buckets of salt-water and wrench out that bath-tub; and if you’re longer than ten minutes, damme if I don’t break you all to +PIECES+.” Sammie has a woful time of it on board; for, besides doing all conceivable sorts of dirty work, he is the butt of the ship’s company, teased beyond endurance by the men, and kicked and pounded mercilessly by both mates. Probably his most disagreeable and anxious moments are passed in the pantry while we are at meals. His dread of the old man is so intense that in his awful presence he is little better than a lunatic. While he is in the pantry he dwells in terror of a summons to the table; and when “You, Sam!” finally does come crashing forth, and he reaches the captain’s side in a single bound, it irritates this singular man excessively. Then, of course, the mate must needs rake up some fancied grievance against the unhappy lad, who is immensely relieved when he is ordered in disgrace from the dining-room. The other day the skipper told him, in my wife’s presence, that he was not fit to carry guts to a bear. It seemed to us that that was exactly what he was doing, especially as he had a dish of tongues and sounds in his hand at the moment, which to me is the most objectionable of all sea-food; it’s worse than burgoo and ham-fat. Latitude, 56° 12′ south; longitude, 67° 32′ west. +July 22+ Wore round at eight this morning, and stood north and west once more on the port tack, as the wind backed into the southward and allowed us to come up to west-northwest by compass, or northwest by west true, which is not bad. We made so little to the good, though, in the twenty-four hours that it cannot be said that we are doing anything more than waltzing up and down the sixty-seventh meridian. We have gone through the water fast enough, but not in the right direction; for forty-eight hours now we have been under single-reefed topsails, and if a ship can carry that canvas she will do five or six knots an hour even in a heavy sea. A single reef in the topsails means generally whole main-sail and foresail, which is enough to send a vessel ahead at a good rate. When the main-sail is reefed or hauled up, though, a ship goes to leeward nearly as fast as she goes ahead.