Breakfast was just about to begin, when my enemy, the boatswain, appeared at the galley door. “Here, cook,” he said, “where's that limb of a boy? Oh, you're there, are you? Feeding your face. Get a three-cornered scraper right now. You'll scrape up that slush you spilled, before you eat so much as a reefer's nut.” I had to go on deck again for another hour, while I scraped up the slush, which was, surely, spilled as much by himself as by me, since he was not looking where he was going any more than I was. I got no breakfast. For after the grease was cleaned I was sent to black the gentlemen's boots; then to make up their beds; then to scrub their cabin clean. After all this, being faint with hunger, I took a ship's biscuit from the locker in the cabin to eat as I worked. I did not know it; but this biscuit was what is known as “captain's bread,” a whiter (but less pleasant) kind of ship's biscuit, baked for officers. As I was eating it (I was polishing the cabin door-knobs at the time) the captain came down for a dram of brandy. He saw what I was eating. At once he read me a lecture, calling me a greedy young thief. Let me not eat another cabin biscuit, he said, or he'd do to me what they always did to thieves:--drag them under the ship from one side to another, so that the barnacles would cut them (as he said) into Spanish sennet-work. When I answered him, he lost his temper, in sailor fashion, saying that if I said another word he'd make me sick that ever I learned to speak.