Seeing how it had been with him, they made him go below also, which he, with shipmates helping, did; and also, later, put on the dry shift of clothes they made ready. In the middle of it all he asked, “Where’s Johnnie?” “In his bunk--and full of hot coffee--where you’ll be in a minute.” “The hell I will! there’s my dory yet to be hoisted in.” “Your dory, Martin? Why, she’s in, drained dry and griped long ago.” “What! and me below? And dory in already? What was it? Did I fall asleep, or what? Lord! but it’s an old man I must be getting. I wouldn’t’ve believed it. In all my time to sea, that’s the first time ever I warn’t able to lift hand to tayckles and my own dory hoisting in.” He made for the companion-way, but so weak was he that he fell back down the companion-way when he tried to make the deck. But a really strong man recuperates rapidly. An hour later Martin was enjoying a fine hot supper, while the crew sat around and hove questions at him. They asked for details, and he gave them, or at least such of them as had become impressed on his mind; particularly did he condemn, in crisp phrases, the botheration of boots that leaked and the need of a second plug-strap on the bottom of a dory. “There ought to be a new law about plug-straps,” said Martin. “Did ever a man yet come off the bottom of a dory and not speak about the plug-straps?” commented one. “And leaky boots is the devil,” affirmed another--a notorious talker this one, who bunked up in the peak, where he could be dimly seen now, his head out of his bunk that his voice might carry the better. “I bought a pair of boots in Boston once--a Jew up on Atlantic Avenue----” “In Heaven’s name, will you shut up, you and your Atlantic Avenue boots? We’ll never hear the end of those boots.” The man in the peak subsided, and he who had quelled him, near to the stove and smoking a pipe, went on for himself: “And what were you thinkin’ of, Martin, when you thought you were goin’?” “Or did you think any time that you was goin’?” asked somebody else. “Indeed and I did, and a dozen times I thought it--and that ’twas a blessed cold kind of a day for a man to be soaking his feet in the ocean.” “And yet”--the lad in the peak was in commission again--“and yet warn’t it some professor said in that book that somebody was reading out of the other day--warn’t it him said that salt water ain’t nigh so cold as fresh. Is it, Martin?” “As to that,” answered Martin, “I dunno. But I wish ’twas that professor’s feet, not mine, was astraddle the bottom of that dory--not to wish him any harm. But winter’s day and the wind no’therly, I found it cold enough.” “I went into a Turkish bath parlor in New York one time,” came the conversational voice from the peak, “and hot? My Lord----”