The _Wizard_ was a very “wet ship.” She loved giving us moist surprises. Sometimes on a fine day she would gracefully, but suddenly, poke her nose under, and come up and out of the Atlantic or Pacific ocean with fifteen or twenty tons of pea-green sea water foaming over the t’gallant forecastle, cascading thence on the spar deck and washing everything movable slam bang up and sometimes into the cabin. This took place once on a washday. Sailors’ washday is often regulated by the supply of water caught from the clouds. On this particular occasion the fore deck was full of old salts up to their bared elbows in suds, vigorously discoursing washtub and washboard. Then the flood came, and in a moment the deck was filled with a great surge bearing on its crest all these old salts struggling among their tubs, their washboards, their soap and partly-washed garments. The cabin bulkhead partly stopped some, but the door being open others were borne partly inside, and their woollen shirts were afterward found stranded on the carpeted cabin floor. One “duff day” we had gathered about our extra repast in the boys’ house. The duff and New Orleans molasses had just commenced to disappear. Then a shining, greenish, translucent cataract filled the doorway from top to bottom. It struck boys, beef, bread, duff, and dishes. It scattered them. It tumbled them in various heaps. It was a brief season of terror, spitting, and sputtering salt water, and a scrambling for life, as we thought. It washed under bunks and in remote corners duff, bread, beef, plates, knives, forks, cups, spoons and molasses-bottles. The dinner was lost. Going on deck we found a couple of feet of water swashing from bulwark to bulwark with every roll, bearing with it heavy blocks and everything movable which had been loosened by the shock, to the great risk of legs and bodies. But these were trifles. At least we call them trifles when they are over. I have noticed, however, that a man may swear as hard at a jammed finger as a broken leg, and the most efficacious means in the world to quickly develop a furious temper is to lose one’s dinner when hungry, get wet through, then abused by a Dutch mate for not stirring around quicker, and finally work all the afternoon setting things to rights on an empty stomach, robbed and disappointed of its duff. This is no trifle.