Captain Burke was in his cabin, the surly mate had charge of the ship, so Mr. Owen accompanied us. There was little to see, however; we went to the galley and looked in, and here we found the ship's cook making a pie for the cabin. He was the fat-armed, dough-faced man who had stared at us with imbecile curiosity when we came on board. It was a queer little kitchen, not many times larger than a sentry box. Mrs. Burke asked the man if the oven baked well. 'Too vell, mum,' he answered, turning his face with an expression of dull surprise upon it at sight of us standing in the galley doorway. 'He's for burning up. He vants too much vatching.' 'How do you like being ship's cook?' said Mr. Owen. 'Almost as much, I dessay, as you likes being ship's doctor,' he answered. Mr. Owen looked deaf on a sudden, and, stepping back, found something to interest him aloft. 'What pie is that?' said Mrs. Burke, who had been casting her eye over the little interior, with its equipment of shelves, crockery, oven, coppers and the like, with the critical gaze of an exacting housekeeper. As she asked the question the ship leaned sharply upon a sea; the cook staggered with a wild flourish of the knife he was trimming the pie-crust with; the pie slipped and fell with a crash, breaking in halves, and out rolled a dishful of preserved gooseberries. 'You can see vat it is for yourself, mum,' said the cook, lancing his knife at the mess on the deck with a force which drove the blade quivering into the hard plank. 'Who'd be a blooming ship's cook? This is the sort of life it is!' and, heedless of our presence, he began to swear, and then roared out for Bill or some such name--meaning, I suppose, his mate--that the fellow might come and swab up the gooseberry puddle. We walked on to the forecastle. 'That cook's a very insolent fellow,' said Mr. Owen. 'I hope he will give me the pleasure of prescribing for him.' 'All sea cooks are ill-tempered,' said Mrs. Burke. 'They live in little boxes like that, and are obliged, for want of room, to stand close to furnaces all day long, and their livers swell. But their trials are many. I've heard of a sea striking a galley where the cook was in it full of the business of the cabin dinner, and washing him and his kitchen right aft, where he was rescued out of a depth of water as high as a man's waist holding on for his life to a frying-pan. Cooks ashore never meet with blows of that sort.' A number of the crew were at work on various jobs in this part of the vessel. Two sat upon a sail, stitching at it. Hard by was a little machine called a spun-yarn winch, merrily clinking, with a boy walking backwards from it as it yielded the line it twisted.