How long poor Flashley continued to perform his multifarious duties on board the ‘Nancy’ he had no idea, but they appeared at times very onerous, and he had to undergo many hardships. This was especially the case in the North Sea during the winter months, which are often of the severest kind on the coast between Sunderland and the mouth of the Thames. The rigging was all frozen, so that to lay hold of a rope seemed to take the skin off his hand; the cold went to the bone, and he hardly knew if his hands were struck through with frost, or by a hot iron. The decks were all slippery with ice, so were the ladders down to the cabins, and the cook’s galley was garnished all round with large icicles, from six inches to a foot and a half in length, which kept up a continual drip, drip, on all sides, by way of complimentary acknowledgment of the caboose-fire inside. Sometimes the wind burst the side-doors open—blew the fire clean out of the caboose, and scattered the live and dead coals all over the deck, or whirled them into the sea. One night the galley itself, with all its black and smutty paraphernalia, was torn up and blown overboard. It danced about on the tops of the waves—made deep curtseys—swept up the side of a long billow—was struck by a cross-wave, and disappeared in a hundred black planks and splinters. That same night Flashley was called up from his berth to go aloft and lend a hand to close-reef the main-topsail. The sail was all frozen, and so stiff that he could not raise it; but as he hauled on one of the points, the point broke, and something happened to him,—he did not know what, but he thought he fell backwards, and the wind flew away with him. The next thing he remembered was that of lying in his berth with a bandage round one arm, and a large patch on one side of his head, while the cook sat on a sea-chest by his side reading to him. A deep splashing plunge was now heard, followed by the rapid rumbling of an iron chain along the deck overhead. The collier had arrived off Rotherhithe, and cast anchor. ‘Up, Flashley!’ cried the cook; ‘on deck, my lad! to receive the whippers who are coming alongside.’ ‘What for?’ exclaimed Flashley; ‘why am I to be whipped?’ ‘It is not you,’ said the cook, laughing gruffly, as he ran up the ladder, ‘but the coal-baskets that are to be whipped up, and discharged into the lighter.’