I had thought to catch a glance, perhaps _one_ glance, during the meal from Miss Temple, who might probably recollect her few words with me on the preceding evening, and her cool trick of sliding off to let me talk aloud to myself. But she never turned her eyes my way. She sometimes spoke across the table to Mr. Colledge, once inclined her fine figure towards Captain Keeling to respond to some remark of his, and occasionally exchanged a sentence with her aunt. But the rest of us might have been as much hidden as the body of Crabb was forward, for all the attention she honoured us with. ‘I am glad that this funeral is going to take place,’ Mr. Johnson said to me. ‘I have promised a friend of mine who owns a newspaper in London a series of articles on this voyage, and down to this time I haven’t quite seen my way. For what has happened proper to tell? Dash my wig! saving that collision, of which I couldn’t make head nor tail, and dare not therefore attempt, what ghost of an incident good for what I may call word-painting has occurred?’ ‘This burial should give you the chance you want,’ said I. ‘Yes,’ he exclaimed; ‘I shall be able to do it justice, I believe. I am a little uncertain in the matter of nautical terms; and when I’ve finished the account of it, I should be glad if you’d listen to it, Mr. Dugdale, and correct any trifling technical errors I may happen to make. Even now, I’ll be shot if I can tell the difference between starboard and larboard--never can remember, somehow. The words are so confoundedly alike, you know.’ ‘If I were you,’ said I, ‘I should not suffer ignorance of the sea-life to hinder me from writing fully about it. Few sailors read; nobody else understands the calling. Say what you like, and you need only dash your absurdities into your canvas with a cocksure brush to be accepted as an authority.’ ‘Still,’ he exclaimed, ‘in an account of a funeral at sea I should like to have the rigging right; nor in a description which,’ added he complacently, ‘is not likely to be wanting in some of the choicer qualities of poetry, would it be desirable, insignificant as the error might be in the eyes of landsmen, to mistake the mainmast for, let me say, the spanker boom.’ I assured him that I should be glad to hear his account when he had written it; and soon afterwards we left the table and went on deck.