And of the several loafing, lounging pictures upon which my eye rested the completest were the Dutchmen’s. But _they_ were built for it, bolstered as they were by a swell of stern that pitched their bodies into an attitude unattainable by the English Jacks, who, like all British sailors, were remarkable for flatness _there_. Yan Bol walked to and fro abreast of the row of loungers, his hands buried in his pockets, a pipe inverted betwixt his lips, his deep voice rumbling at intervals. The tones of the men--I could not hear their speech--the looks of them, one and all, hinted at a sort of dog-watch council. ’Twas a perfect ocean picture in that dying light. The brig pitched heavily as she rushed forward, and under the wide yawn of the swollen foresail you saw, as her bows came down, the streaming rush of the white waters set boiling by her steam, and sweeping up the green and freckled acclivity into whose hollow she had swept. You saw the figures of the men dimming to the deepening shadow, one clear tint of costume after another waning, the red shirt growing ashen, the blue blending with the gloom, here and there a face stealing out red against the light of a flaming knot of ropeyarns handed through the galley door for lighting a pipe. Oh, but I felt weary of it, though! That salt hissing over the side, that sullen thunder of smiting and smitten surge, that ceaseless shrilling and piping aloft, the buoyant rise, the roaring fall--I was fresh from two years of it, and here it was all to do and to hearken to and to suffer over again, for how many months? But, courage! thought I, whistling “Tom Bowling” in time with the lift of the seas; there should be plenty of land in sight from the height of such a heap as six thousand pounds will make. Only is it a dream? is it a dream? is it a dream? and the melody of “Tom Bowling” sped through my set teeth shriller than the song of the backstay that my hand had grasped.