Things went from better to best. We reached the place where the fact of the shop’s being a ship, and the engineer the captain, and I the mate, and the smith the bos’n, _ad infinitum_, came to be a matter of general knowledge, and we were admired and congratulated and laughed with until nearly all the workers of the shop, with some trifling and unimportant exceptions, the foreman for one, began to share our illusion--carpenters, cabinet-makers, joiners, all. The one exception, as I say, was the foreman, only he was a host in himself, a mean, ill-dispositioned creature, of course, who looked upon all such ideas as fol-de-rol, and in a way subversive of order and good work. He was red-headed, big-handed, big-footed, dull. He had no imagination beyond lumber and furniture, no poetry in his soul. But the crew, the hundred-headed crew, accepted it as a relief. They liked to think they were not really working, but out upon a blue and dancing sea, and came back one by one, the carpenters, the tinsmiths, the millwrights, one and all, with cheerful grins to do us honor. “So you’re the captain, eh?” lazy old Jack, the partner of car-loading Carder, asked of the engineer, and John looked his full dignity at once. “That I am, Jack,” he replied, “only able seamen ain’t supposed to ask too many familiar questions. Are they, mate?” “Well, I should say not,” I replied, arriving with a basket of shavings. “Able seamen should always salute the captain before addressing him, anyhow, and never fail to say _Sir_. Still, our crew is new. It’s not very _able_ and the seamen end of it is a little _on the fritz_, I’m thinking. But, all things considered, we can afford to overlook a few errors until we get everything well in hand. Eh, Captain?” “Right, mate,” returned the captain genially. “You’re always right--nearly.” Before I could start an argument on this score, one of the able seamen, one who was thus discourteously commented on, observed, “I don’t know about that. Seems to me the mate of this here ship ain’t any too much shucks, or the captain either.” The captain and I were a little dismayed by this. What to do with an able seaman who was too strong and too dull to take the whole thing in the proper spirit? It threatened smooth sailing! This particular person was old Stephen Bowers, the carpenter from the second floor who never to us seemed to have quite the right lightness of spirit to make a go of all this. He was too likely to turn rough but well-meant humor into a personal affront to himself. “Well, Captain, there you are,” I said cautiously, with a desire to maintain order and yet peace. “Mutiny, you see.” “It does look that way, don’t it?” big John replied, eyeing the newcomer with a quizzical expression, half humorous, half severe. “What’ll we do, mate, under such circumstances?”