It was particularly disagreeable at midnight as we assembled at the bell ropes to give her the last “shake-up,” and more asleep than awake pulled wearily with monotonous clank. Sometimes at that hour, when our labors were half through, the valves would get out of order. It was then necessary to call the carpenter and have them repaired. This would keep us on deck half an hour or more, for by mutual compact each watch was obliged to “suck its own pumps.” Such delays made the men very angry. They stopped singing at their work--always a bad sign--and became silent, morose, and sullen. For the first six weeks all the “shanti songs” known on the sea had been sung. Regularly at each pumping exercise we had “Santy Anna,” “Bully in the Alley,” “Miranda Lee,” “Storm Along, John,” and other operatic maritime gems, some of which might have a place in our modern operas of _The Pinafore_ school. There’s a good deal of rough melody when these airs are rolled out by twenty or thirty strong lungs to the accompaniment of a windlass’ clank and the wild, shrill sweep of the winds in the rigging above. But the men would no longer sing. The fact was reported to the Captain. He put on his spectacles, walked out on the quarter-deck and gazed at them mournfully and reprovingly. The mates tried to incite them to renewed melody. But the shipping articles did not compel them to sing unless they felt like it. The pumps clanked gloomily without any enlivening chorus. The Captain went sadly back to his cabin and renewed his novel.