The noise of many voices had been slowly growing in the cuddy. The swell and the volume of sound were assurance that the interior was full. I wondered the people did not drink and revel on the deck, where there was plenty of room and fresh air and dewy coolness. The cuddy, perhaps, was like being ashore, and put them in mind of their old haunts. There was no likeness, indeed, to a tavern in it, yet the convicts might find something to refresh their memory of the boozing-kens in the broken mirrors and the low pitch of the ceiling or upper deck and in the bulkheads, which would answer to their idea of walls, particularly should the atmosphere become dense with tobacco smoke and sickening with the fumes of rum and clamorous as a houseful of shrieking madmen with the songs, jokes, laughter, and the many humours of the stews and kennels. The _Childe Harold_ was a very stoutly built ship. The cabin bulkheads were exceedingly thick and substantial. I could not hear individual voices plainly; the combined growl of the men’s speech, often rising into a sort of roar like to the noise of a breaker sweeping back from a beach after it has burst into froth, overwhelmed the particular notes and accents which swelled it. Sometimes I thought I could hear Barney Abram shouting, then there’d happen a sinking in the tumult when I’d catch a loud, coarse laugh, solitary and startling, or the voice of a man beginning a song that was quickly drowned by the freshening of the hubbub. There was a constant scraping and squeezing past my cabin bulkhead, as though of people coming and going or thrusting to make room, with a jarring grumble of talk but indistinct to me. This sort of thing may have gone on for about half an hour. I looked at the chronometer, and calculated that it was about half-past eight. I longed for nine o’clock, when Tom had promised to come. The people were fast growing noisier. Frequent scuffles occurred just outside my door. The cuddy was densely packed, and the scuffling signified the struggle of some of the fellows to draw close to the table where the drink was. It was short of nine by a quarter of an hour when the key was turned and Tom came in. This cabin-door was close to the cuddy quarter-deck entrance; yet the interior was so full that when Tom entered and came in with a sort of run, as though he had helped himself with his elbows, I saw the crowd, close-packed, pressed hard against Bates’s cabin opposite, as they were against mine. ‘Hold my arm,’ said Tom. I seized him, and he took me through the door and shoved to right and left to make a passage through, the cuddy entrance, that stood but five or six feet away. He then returned to lock the door.