A quick-acting, quick-talking, wiry little fellow was John. Big Bill couldn't keep up with him at all. Bill's right name was not Bill. Nobody knew what it was; nor cared. Bill was probably a better name, anyway. One peek at him as the big fellow hove himself aboard was enough for John. "Will ye look at Big Bill!" cried John; after that no other name would fit him. "Lard, Lard," said John, "but I be wantin' to see the look o' that bulk of a man when he jams hisself into a bosun's chair to the masthead!" Bill never could see anything funny in John's line of talk, and said so across the supper-table that same afternoon. Breakfast was at four o'clock, dinner at half-past nine, and supper at three o'clock on the _Henriette_. "Somebody'll come along and set on you right hard some day," said Bill. To which John said: "So long's 'tisn't some one o' your tonnage does the settin', I callate I c'n stand it," and then, reaching over and scooping to himself another wedge of blueberry pie: "You cert'nly do make great blueberry pie, cook." "Not so ferry bad," said the cook. He was a good cook, who had followed the sea since he was fifteen. The big ports of the world--he knew them all, and when he wasn't too busy he would talk about them; though what he most liked to talk about was his blueberry patch in Stoneport, where he owned a nice little white house with a simment cellar--up on the hill next the isinglass factory. He had a dog at home, a part of him Skitch and the other part of him Sin Bernard. Gardner, the milkman, owned the Bernard. Who owned the collie he didn't know. Nobody knowed. And when those smart Alecks of Stoneport kids came along and tried to bemboozle those blueberry-bushes where they was hangin' in bunches as on a grapewine, why that dog-- Well, he was the cleffer dog, that was all. He had brought a few of the blueberries aboard, he said; which we very well knew--two bushels of them charged to the ship's stores at current market rates. His blueberry pies were all right; but the blueberry stews! With dumplings! There was a cook sailed out of Homburg on a barque when our cook was a cabin-boy on her, and that dumpling receipt was got out of him one night in Yokohama when the old fellow had a couple of bowls of saki into him. Saki and rice, yes. Which was how it came about that thirty-four years later we were getting dumplings noon and night with our blueberry stew aboard the _Henriette_. John, after maybe five hours to the masthead, would come sliding cheerily down to deck at dinner call. At the head of the forec's'le companionway he would haul up and have half a peek below. And then a sniff. A long sniff, and then a full peek. "Lard Gard, dumplin's!" John would say, and look sadly around and up at sea and sky.