A length of sail was stretched along the waist, and upon it were seated several sailors, flourishing palms and needles as they stitched. They talked together in a low voice that the mate of the watch should not hear them. At one of the fellows who sat with his face towards me, I found myself looking as at a curiosity that slowly compels the attention, spite of any heedless mood you may be in. Many ugly mariners had I met in my time, but never the like of that man. His right eye had a lamentable cast; his back was so round that I imagined he had a hunch. He had enormously long strong arms, with immense fists at the ends of them, and the sleeves of his shirt being rolled to above his elbow exposed a score of extraordinary devices in Indian ink writhing amongst the hair that lay in places like fur upon the flesh. The bridge of his nose had been crushed to his face, and a mere knob with two holes in it stood out about an inch above his hare-lip. Though manifestly an old sailor, salted down for ship’s use by years of seafaring, his complexion was dingy and dough-like as the skin of a London baker, with nothing distinctive upon it saving a number of warts, and a huge mole over a ridge of scarlet eyebrow dashed with a few grey hairs. His hair, that was of coarse brick-red, hung down upon his back, as though, forsooth, the ship’s cook had made a wig for him out of the parings of carrots. Indeed, he was as much a monster as anything that was ever shut up in a cage and carried about as a show. I was watching him with growing interest, wondering to myself what sort of a life such a creature as that had led, what kind of ships he had sailed in chiefly, and how so grotesque an object had been suffered to ‘sign on’ for an Indiaman, in which one might expect to find something of a man-of-war uniformity and smartness of crew, when Mr. Sylvanus Johnson came out from the cuddy, rolling an unlighted cheroot betwixt his lips. ‘See that chap sitting upon the sail yonder?’ said I--‘a good subject for a leading article, Mr. Johnson.’ ‘Oh confound it, Mr. Dugdale; no sneers, if you please. Let me light this cigar at your pipe. That fellow is in Emmett’s way, not mine. Quite a triumph of hideousness, I protest. But what’s the matter with you, this lovely morning? You look a bit down in the mouth, Mr. Dugdale. Not going to be sea-sick, I hope, now that all the rest of us have recovered?’ ‘Down in the mouth? Not I. But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Johnson--when you take charge of your newspaper, will you be so good as to inform the world that there is nothing under the broad sky more consumedly insipid than the chattering of a young man and a young woman when they first meet.’ ‘Why, how now?’ said he. ‘Oh, my dear sir,’ cried I, ‘hear them. The unspeakable drivel of it--the “reallys” and “oh dears” and “yes quites”’--