For the next four days we had plenty of wind and high seas with frequent grey rain-squalls shrouding the ship, and leaving her with streaming decks and darkened canvas and dribbling gear. It was Channel weather again, in short, saving that there was the relish of the temperate parallels in the air, whilst the seas rolled large and wide and regular with all the difference betwixt the motion of the ship and her rollicking neck-breaking capers in the narrow waters that you’d find between the trot of a donkey and the majestical thunderous gallop of a charger. But the wet made a miserable time of it. What was there to be seen on deck save the gleaming forms of men in oil-skins, the sweep of the dark-green surge out of the near veil of haze, the rain-shadowed curves of the canvas--the whole fitly put to music by the damp dull clattering of booms, noises of chafing up aloft, and the wild whistling of the wind upon the taut weather rigging? The males amongst us who smoked would come together after meals in a huddle under the break of the poop, cowering against the weather bulkhead out of the wet of the rain; and on these occasions arguments ran high. If Colonel Bannister was of our company, nothing could be said but that he whipped out with a flat contradiction to it. In fact, he was of that order of mind who reckons its mission to be that of teaching everybody to think correctly. Once he endeavoured to prove to Mr. Emmett that he was wanting in an essential qualification of a painter, namely, an eye for atmosphere, by requesting him to say how far the horizon was off, and roaring in triumph because Mr. Emmett answered five miles. Mr. Johnson, after a careful look at the sea, submitted that Mr. Emmett was right. The colonel, pulling out his white whiskers, asked how it was possible that a journalist should know anything about such things. Angry words were averted by Mynheer Hemskirk, who, with a fat face and foolish smile, broke in with a mouldy old puzzle: ‘Answer me dis: here iss a bortrait. I shtands opposite, und I shay, “Brooders und shisters hov I none boot dot man’s farder iss my farder’s soon! Vot relation iss dot man to dot bicture?”’ The colonel had never heard this, and asked the Dutchman to repeat it. Mr. Hodder in a mild voice said: ‘It is himself.’ Little Mr. Saunders, after thinking hard, said it was his father. ‘_That’s_ it, of course!’ shouted the colonel. The Dutchman said no, and repeated the lines with great emphasis, striking one fist into the palm of the other at every syllable. Then sides were taken merely to enrage the colonel. Some agreed with him, and some with the Dutchman. Mr. Emmett, feigning not to catch the point, compelled the stupid good-natured Hemskirk to repeat the question a dozen times over. So loud was the argument, so angry the colonel, so excited the Dutchman, and so demonstrative most of the others of the listeners, that the chief officer came off the poop to look at us.