The ship was pumped out with the donkey last night, after the sails were all bent, and having had no exercise for some days, the men having pumped only at four in the morning on account of sail-making, etc., I was constrained to take hold of the handle-bar and follow the wheel around, which afforded even more exercise than the ordinary way. If the men maintain constantly thirty strokes to the minute it is good work; whereas, with the donkey whirling the pumps around at more than sixty, the very exertion necessary to keep up with this speed is more than considerable. It is attended, too, with some danger of bodily harm; for if your foot should slip on the wet deck and you did not instantly let go the handle-bar, you would either be jerked over the wheel and slammed down on the other side, or at the next revolution the bar would catch you under the chin and knock your lower jaw into bone-dust. The captain conjectured later on that he, too, needed some exercise, for he went down and worked away with ferocious abandon for perhaps five minutes, standing forth in the bright moonlight a most ridiculous object. For his short, plump, little body was taxed to the very utmost to keep up with the machine, and when his coat-tails whisked wildly about and he staggered now and then to keep his balance, and his arms were jerked back and forth like shuttles, his coat up between his ears, he looked like John Gilpin in a cyclone. But funniest of all was his face. Whenever he exerts himself he always glares over at us to ascertain whether we are laughing at him or not; and last night, as he gazed up at us over the whizzing bar, with bursting cheeks and popping eyes, we thought we had never seen so ludicrous a sight; even more droll than the other day while he was “chinning” himself on the weather mizzen-sheerpole, when he peered over his shoulder at us with so distorted and writhing a countenance that we thought he was strangling. The skipper has a clipping-machine, with which he has almost denuded his head and face of their shaggy masses, and he insists that my own thick growth of hair and beard will be uncomfortable in hot weather, which is no doubt true; but when he offered to “run the machine over your whiskers,” as he expressed it, I thought it best to risk them as they are. Fancy reaping one’s beard with clippers!