“The harbor was still as death. The hot breath of the land-wind had failed. Not a cloud was to be seen on the sky, where the moon and the stars shone with resplendent beauty. The heat was excessive, the least exertion causing the perspiration to stream from the pores. All at once, as I leaned over the quarter, listening to a stir which sprung up on board of my old brig, which had been dismantled and turned into a floating hospital, it struck me that I heard a low murmur of voices, proceeding from the galley of the Tartar. My curiosity being sharpened by the shriek, which had so confused Captain Catherton and the steward, and set Parker and I off on opposite tacks—he thinking of a ghost, and I of the Circassian—I walked slowly for’ard on the larboard side of the deck, anxious to know what was going on. “I soon discovered that the two steerage cronies, the carpenter and the cooper, with the sable master of the coppers himself, were engaged in a solemn conclave. The two whites were great friends; though no two men could appear more unlike in person and character. The carpenter, a Kennebunk man, was short and thickset, as slow and heavy in his motions as an elephant, with a broad, solemn face, as beardless and bare of expression as a plain of sand, with the nose like a ruined obelisk, rising out of it; while the hooper of staves, as straight and thin as a lath, with sharp features, restless, ferrety eyes, and a nose like a cockatoo’s upper mandible, was the very impersonification of an old blue presbyter, on a cruise. These two fellows were the chief manufacturers of the legends set afloat in the ship; nothing escaping the cooper’s eyes and ears, which was deemed worthy of being poured into the carpenter’s brain, from whence, by the slow process of infiltration, it was given in its strength, drop by drop, as it were, to the crew. This I had learned from the second mate; and as the slide of the galley door was partly open on the side facing Muscat Island, as if to let out the smoke of their pipes, and of some mess the cook was coddling in his stew-pan, I could not resist the temptation of turning eaves-dropper for once, and accordingly, sat quietly down on the spars to listen. “The man of chips was speaking, with the slow gravity of an oracle, and as his dull, dogged voice met my ear, I could not but think it fortunate that I chanced to light upon the party at the very moment I did.