The engineers came on board early, for the most part in scrubby blue serge, and sour black temper. They grumbled at the mess-room in broad Glaswegian, prophesied evil (in advance) about the capacities of the mess-room steward and the ship’s cook, dumped their belongings into their various rooms, and changed to apparel more suitable for tail-twisting in the unclean regions below. Then they went on duty, quarreled with the donkeyman who was making steam for the winches, and proceeded to split up their crew of firemen and trimmers into watches, and apportion them to furnace doors and bunkers. The three mates, the boatswain, and the carpenter were also on board betimes, most of them large-headed with recent libations, and feeling cantankerous accordingly. There was a small general cargo being shipped for New Orleans, and it gave these worthy officers ease to find occasional acid fault with the stevedore’s crew or the crane men on the wharf; but, for the most part, they shuffled about the decks in easy slippers, attending to the various ship duties in massive sneering silence. Patrick Onslow came into the chart-house on the bridge-deck, closing the door behind him. “A cheery, amiable crowd you’ve collected,” he said. “Aren’t they?” replied Captain Kettle from a sofa locker. “They’re just a terror of a crew. You wait till we get to sea, and they start on mischief. My mate’s a cur; he wouldn’t stand up to a Chinaman. And the rest of the after-guard is much of a pattern—picked that way on purpose. Oh, I tell you, Mr. Onslow, that I stand alone, and I shall have my hands full. But let ’em start, the brutes. I’ll haze them. It isn’t a new sort of tea-party, this, with me.” “You’re going into it with your eyes open, anyway.” “Oh don’t you make any error, sir,” said Kettle. “I know my job. And if I warn you, it’s because you’ll see things for yourself, and perhaps join in at them. I don’t go and tell everybody. Not much. They think ashore I’ve got a real soft thing on this time. Why, do you know, Mr. Onslow,” he added, with a thin, sour grin, “my old woman wanted to come with me for the trip. She said it was so long since she’s had a whiff of outside air, that now I’d such a tidy steamboat under me, she couldn’t miss the chance. Yes, sir; and she said she’d bring one of the kids with her that wanted to be a sailor, like his daddy! I tell you, she was that took on the idea she’d hear no refusal; and I had to write a letter to owners, and get them to wire back a ‘No’ she could read for herself. It’d look well set to music, that tale, wouldn’t it? Sort of jumpy music, you know, with a yo-heave-humbug chorus to it, same as all sailors’ songs have that you hear in the halls.” Onslow shrugged his shoulders. “What can you expect at the price?” he asked. “This isn’t a twelve-pound-a-month berth; and you’ve threshed across the Atlantic in a worse ship for less.”