'How'll Mr. Green like to recall the violent words he used to the poor fellow, I wonder?' said Mrs. Burke, glancing at the mate, who, to be sure, showed no sensibility. He trudged the deck athwartship with rounded back and arms up and down in the sea fashion; occasionally leering at the sky to windward, or darting a sour look at the canvas aloft. _He_ was no man to muse with regret on the death of the sailor, and lament his own intemperate speech; on the contrary, he was one of those mates who sometimes become masters, to whom human life, provided their own be not imperilled, is of no more consequence than the extinction of the flame of the slush-fed lamp which lights the sailor's sea-parlour. There were many dogs of that sort at sea in those times, and some have survived into these; but the odious breed grows scarce. Indeed, the world has agreed to find the type intolerable, and may the day be at hand when the very last of the race shall be brought to the gangway in the holy grip of the giantess Education, and dropped overboard to plumb the depths of time, where lie the green bones of Trunnion, Hatchway, and others of the clan! Mr. Owen recommended that the body should be buried that afternoon. The weather was very hot; the breeze was slackening and the sea sheeting out--full of fitful winding lanes of light as though the sun struck upon wakes and tracks of oil--into the thickening distance, where the heat was showing in a sensible presence of film, blending sky and water till it was like looking at them through tears. 'Very well,' said Captain Burke; 'in the first dog watch, if you please.' It was at that hour almost calm, with a broad road of hot red light, billowing snakelike from the ship's side over the soft undulations of the western swell towards the rayless sun that still floated at some height in the sky. I stood beside Mrs. Burke on the quarter-deck, prayer-book in hand; the sailors came in a body from forward, and amongst them they bore the corpse--an outline of tragic suggestion under the large red ensign that hid it. They lifted out a portion of the gangway and rested one end of the plank in the gap, and the captain began to read. What is there in shore-going ceremony to compare in solemnity, in pathos, in all the deepest of the meanings which are interpretable out of human forms and customs, with the simple burial at sea? All was as silent upon the water as the sinking of the sun himself into the broadening road of gold under him. Aloft was a gentle sound of winnowing canvas; a sob of the sea from alongside sometimes broke in upon the captain's delivery. The expressions on the faces of the rough seamen were for the most part fixed. How many shipmates and messmates had they helped bury in their time? How should they be concerned by death? themselves having the Skeleton at their heels every hour of their existence at sea, allowed but a crooked finger for their own lives, all the remainder of their hands being their owner's!