But so as not to hurt the cook's feelings, John, when he sat down, would take the big fork and go sounding in the blueberry stew, and soon, bright blue and beautiful, he would gaff a half-dozen of them onto his plate. And the cook, noticing it, would smile and say: "You like tem tumplings, Chon?" And John would say: "This side o' Fortune Bay I never saw nothin' to ekal 'em." And when the cook would turn his back, John would slip them into his pocket. After dinner John would take the dumplings aloft, and, when Big Bill would take the skipper's place out at the end of the bowsprit, John would heave the dumplings at him from the masthead. Sometimes he would heave a few astern at whoever happened to have the wheel. Generally it was Oliver at the wheel, because his eyesight was not so sharp as the others of us for seeing fish from aloft. Oliver was the first spectacled fisherman that John had ever seen; and one day when Oliver laid his glasses down, John took them up, and set them on his own nose and picked up a newspaper. And quickly removed them. "Lard, Lard, a swordfish she'd look like a whale in them and his sword as long's a vessel's bowsprit!" When Oliver was not to the wheel, Steve would be there. Steve was a tall fellow. To give an idea of how tall he was, John would run down the deck, leap into the air and give a grab at the sky. "Where me hand touched would maybe reach to his waist," John would say. Steve, when he turned in, had to let his feet hang over his bunkboard and onto the locker; and when he did that John came and sat on them. Steve slept in the cabin under the overhang. Big Bill slept under the overhang, too, in the opposite bunk. One of our pleasures was to watch Bill kick his way into his bunk under the low overhang, then to tell him the skipper wanted to see him on deck, and watch him wiggle his way out. Feet first he had to come. Steve could do it all right, but Bill--he weighed three hundred. On foggy nights Bill turned in on the locker, with one arm and leg stretched out to keep him from rolling onto the floor. He had once been in a steamer collision, and he warn't of any notion to be sent to the bottom by no steamer collision--leastways not if he saw her comin'. And he callated to see her comin'. His last word to the next on watch on a foggy night was always: "Call me soon's you see any steamer lights. An' don't wait to diskiver if it be a pote or stabbid light." On watch in a fog Bill never got farther away from the fog-horn than he could make in two leaps; and he was no Olympic leaper.