As in duty bound, the mate agreed with the skipper, which he did by sharp jerks and winks in the old man’s direction; and even went him one better by telling how, in ancient days on the Pacific coast, _he_ had had a crew in the “Jacob Billings,” for nineteen months on end, who used to lift the ship clean out of the water. But his manner of speech at meals in the captain’s presence! His absurd, grotesque ways! He is always much embarrassed how to begin when he has anything on his mind; and I can see him now, grinning and simpering like a fool, gazing intently out of the forward window. At last his meditations overwhelm him; and, drawing his greasy sleeve several times across his mouth from ear to ear, he begins to utter odd sounds in his throat, still staring out on the main-deck. Gradually he grows bolder, and fragments of sentences can be here and there detected; when suddenly, carried entirely away, he turns his bleary eyes full upon you and finishes in a violent shout, instantly collapsing, like an exhausted bellows. Often, during an evening, when I go on deck for a breath of air before turning in, he will discourse thus: “I tell you, Mr. Stevens, Noo York carn’t touch San Francisco for cheap livin’. Why, sir, I can git a meal in a ’igh-toned rest’rant there for less nor a quarter of what I can East. Me and the wife was passin’ along the street in San Francisco one evenin’ (yer’d never take me for the mate of a ship, sir, if you was to meet me ashore), and she says to me, says she, ‘’Arry, I’m ’ungry,’ says she. ‘Hall right,’ I says, ‘so am I.’ So we goes into a ’igh-toned rest’rant and has a bowl er soup, a bit er fish, a pick er veal, some vegetables, a piece er pie, and a big cupper corfee. And ’ow much d’ye think it were? Ten cents apiece. ‘Pretty good,’ says I to th’ old woman; ‘we’ll try it in Noo York.’ So w’en we got East ag’in, we went into a rest’rant on Fulton Street, near the ferry, up two flights. Oh, it were ’igh-toned, too, sir. They ’ad niggers for waiters. So I picked one out and says to ’im, ‘’Ere, you, bring a bit er steak,’ I says, ‘some pertaters, and corfee.’ Well, I ’ad to leave the steak, I couldn’t eat it; and I says to the nigger, ‘Take them pertaters back; I never eats warmed-over vegetables.’ And wot d’ye think they stuck me? Fifty cents each!”