“It is a very buoyant heave,” said I; “I should imagine you are at sea with a swept hold.” He continued to brush his hair. “Excuse me, is your lad Jimmy an idiot?” “Not at all. Perhaps I know why you ask. You heard me and Galloon giving him a lesson just now. Jimmy Vinten is no idiot, but he wants a faculty, and Galloon and I are endeavoring to create it. He cannot distinguish dishes. He will put a bit of beef on the table and call it pudding. He’ll knock on my door and sing out, ‘The pork’s sarved,’ when he means pease soup. His memory is remarkable in other ways. Wait a minute, and we’ll go on deck together.” I sat upon a locker to talk to Galloon, to kiss the beast’s cold snout, and with his paw in my hand, while his tail swayed like the naked mast of an oysterman in a quick sea, I thanked him with many loving words for having saved my life. His eye languished up at me. Oh! if ever there was an expression of serene and heartfelt satisfaction in the eye of a dog that for some noble action is being thanked with caresses, it shone in Galloon’s eyes while he seemed to listen to me. After a few minutes Greaves joined me, equipped in his pea coat, fur cap, and top boots--a massive privateering figure of a man, handsome, determined of gaze, yet with something of softness in his looks, and intimations of gentleness in the motions of his lips and in his occasional smile. He led the way up the companion steps, and I stood upon the deck of the brig looking about me. Seasoned as I was to the life which the ocean puts into the shipwright’s plank, I should not have suspected, from the motion of the vessel only, that so considerable a sea was running. The wind was two or three points abaft the beam; it was blowing half a gale--a clear gale. The clouds were flying in bales and rags of wool toward the pouring southern verge of the ocean; the dark blue brine, sparkling with the flying eastern sunshine, swelled in hills to the brig’s counter, and the foam swept in sheets backward from each rushing head. The brig was under whole topsails and a topgallant sail, but abreast, to leeward, was another brig heading north, stripped to a single band of main topsail and a double-reefed forecourse--ay, Jack, the square foresail and mainsail in my time carried two and sometimes three reefs--and the beat of the head seas obscured her in frequent snowstorms as she struggled wildly aslant amid the dark blue billows. _We_ were roaring through the water at ten or eleven knots. To every stoop of the bows the foam rose boiling above the catheads, with a mighty, thunderous bursting away of the parted seas on either hand. Ships in those times made a great noise when they went through the water. They were all bow and beam, and anything that was over took the form of stern, immensely square, and as clamorous when in motion as any other part of the ship. The _Black Watch_ would be laughed at as a cask in these days, but as vessels then went she was a clipper.