One great trial with me lay in the difficulty of distinguishing fresh water from salt--I mean by the eye. We sea cooks use salt water to boil beef and potatoes in: or rather to boil beef and pork and steam the potatoes. So I usually had a pail of salt water and one of fresh standing by the galley door. Sometimes these got mixed up. I always found this out after making salt-water coffee, but then it was too late. They were particular, especially in the cabin, and did not like salt-water coffee. On any strictly disciplined vessel the cook for such an offence would have been compelled to drink a quart or so of his own coffee, but some merciful cherub aloft always interfered and got me out of bad scrapes. Another annoyance was the loss of spoons and forks thrown accidentally overboard as I flung away my soup and grease-clouded dishwater. It was indeed bitter when, as occupied in these daily washings I allowed my mind to drift to other and brighter scenes, to see the glitter of a spoon or fork in the air or sinking in the deep blue sea, and then to reflect that already there were not enough spoons to go around, or forks either. Our storeroom was the cabin. Among other articles there was a keg of molasses. One evening after draining a quantity I neglected to close the faucet tightly. Molasses therefore oozed over the cabin floor all night. The cabin was a freshet of molasses. Very early in the morning the captain, getting out of his bunk, jumped both stockinged feet into the saccharine deluge. Some men will swear as vigorously in a foot-bath of molasses as they would in one of coal-tar. He did. It was a very black day for me, and life generally seemed joyless and uninviting; but I cooked on. The _Henry_ was full of mice. These little creatures would obtrude themselves in my dough wet up for fresh bread over night, become bemired and die therein. Once a mouse thus dead was unconsciously rolled up in a biscuit, baked with it, and served smoking hot for the morning’s meal aft. It was as it were an involuntary meat-pie. Of course the cabin grumbled; but they would grumble at anything. They were as particular about their food as an habitué of Delmonico’s. I wish now at times I had saved that biscuit to add to my collection of odds-and-endibles. Still even the biscuit proved but an episode in my career. I cooked on, and those I served stood aghast, not knowing what would come next.