We were standing under the fore end of the quarter-deck awning, where we could command the heights of the main and fore as well as see the brig astern. Whilst Captain Burke was talking to me about her, his wife hard by listening, assuring me I need have no doubt if the vessel safely arrived at her port that her master would forward the letter to my father, seeing that captains of ships hold this sort of obligation as sacred: I say whilst the captain was talking thus, he happened to look aloft, and, following the direction of his eye, I saw a seaman on the weather fore topsail yard; his feet were on the foot-rope, he overlay the yard, the outline of his figure clear as a tracing in ink with his yellow naked calves and feet dingy against the white canvas. What he did I could not see. The captain broke off and eyed the man intently; then, looking round a little at Mr. Green, he exclaimed, 'What does that fellow mean by sogering up there? I've been watching him. Who is it? Call him down. I don't want any loafing of that sort aboard my ship.' The mate went some steps forward and, looking up, bellowed in a voice as harsh as the noise of surf on shingle, 'Fore topsail yard there! Come down out of that, you ----' and here he employed several examples of the forecastle speech which I will not write down because they are not proper to remember, though we are to believe that the business of the sea cannot be got through without brutal language. The man looked down at the mate, and said something; Mr. Green roared out again to him to 'lay down,' on which I observed the sailor slided a yard or two along the foot-ropes towards the topmast rigging; he then fell! He struck the deck near the galley. Mrs. Burke shrieked. The man got up in a moment, stood erect with blood gushing down his cheeks, and smiled at us, and the next moment dropped dead. I fainted, and when I came to my head was resting on Mrs. Burke's knee, and Captain Burke was fanning me. The body had been carried into the forecastle, a couple of seamen were scrubbing at the stains in the white planks. Mr. Owen came slowly aft, and said that the poor fellow was dead; then saw to me, took me by the hand, and seated me in the coolness under the awning, where the pleasant shadow was fresh with the gushing of the wind out of the hollow of the great mizzen. It was a frightful thing to have seen. I was looking at the man when he fell, and my sight followed the flash of the poor figure to the shocking _thud_ of the deck! I saw him rise and smile--a smile made dreadful by blood and heart-subduing by the suddenness of his falling back dead.