“See to the brig, Fielding. She’s a fine boat, don’t you think? If she didn’t drag so much water--look at that lump of sea on either quarter--she’d be a comet in speed. Why the deuce don’t the shipwrights ease off when they come aft, instead of holding on with the square run of the butter-box to the very lap of the taffrail?” He looked aloft; he looked around the sea; he walked to the binnacle and watched the motion of the card; he then went below. It was nearly dark. The red was gone out of the west, but the dying sheen of it seemed to linger in the south and east, whither the shapeless masses of shadow were flying across the pale and windy stars, piling themselves down there with a look of boiling-up, as though the rush of vapor smote the hindmost of the clouds into steam. Why, thought I, it was but a day or two ago that I, mate of the _Royal Brunswicker_, was conning that ship, with her head pointing t’other way, in these same waters; and then I was thinking of Uncle Joe, and of some capers ashore, and of the relief of a month or two’s rest from the derned hurl of the restless billow, as the poets call it, with plenty of country to smell and fields to walk in, and a draught of new milk whenever I had a mind. Only a day or two ago--it seems no longer. Insensibility takes no count of time. In fact, whether I knew it or not, I went to sea again on this voyage on the same day on which I arrived in the Downs, after two years of furrin-going. How will it end? I shall become a fish. But six thousand pounds, thought I, to be picked up, invested, safely secured betwixt this and next May, I dare say! Oh, it’s good enough--it’s good enough; and I whistled through my teeth, with a young man’s light heart, as I walked, watching the brig closely, nevertheless, and observing that the fellows at the helm kept her before it, as though her keel was sweeping over metal rails. CHAPTER X. WE TRANSHIP VAN LAAR. It blew fresh all that night and all next day. I was for carrying on, and shook a reef out of the forecourse and set the topgallant sail; and when Greaves came on deck he looked up, and that was all. He would not trust the brig with too much sail on her in a staggering breeze when Van Laar had charge of the deck; but he trusted her now, and trusted her afterward to Yan Bol when he came to relieve me; and hour after hour the _Black Watch_ stormed along, bowing her spritsail yard at the bowsprit’s end into the foam of her own hurling till it was buried, and every shroud and backstay was as taut as wire, and sang, swelling into such a concert as you must sail the stormy ocean to hear, with a noise of drums rolling through it out of the hollow of the sails, and no lack of bugle notes and trumpeting as each sea swept the brig to its summit.