"'Well--hang me!' said a writer, as soon as he could speak, 'but this _is_ a stroke beyond the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge!' 'Every man his own priest--ha! ha! ha!' shouted another. 'I say, Smythe,' sung out a cadet, 'just fancy--ha! ha! "D. Snout, Esquire, and Co."--ho! ho! ho! you know it's too rich to enjoy by ourselves, "_My_thullogy store," Bombay, near the cathedral!' 'Cheap Brahmas, wholesale and retail--eh? families supplied!' 'By George! he's a genius lost!' said Smythe; 'but the parson needn't have broken with him for that--I shouldn't wonder, now, if they had joined partnership, but Daniel might have thought of mining all their clay heads with gunpowder and percussion locks, so that the missionary could have gone round afterwards and blown up heathenship by a touch!' "The noise of all this soon brought along the rest of the gentlemen, and few could help laughing. When the thing got wind on deck, however, neither the old skipper nor the men seemed to like it much; what with the notion of the ship's being taken, as it were, by a thousand or two of ugly little imps and Pagan idols, besides bringing up a drowned man's concerns, and 'yawhawing,' as they said, into his very door--it was thought the best thing to have them all chucked overboard next morning. "'Twas a beautifully fine night, clear aloft, and the moon rising large on our larboard bow, out of a delicate pale sort of haze, as the ship headed south'ard with the breeze; for I marked the haze particularly, as well as the colour of the sky, that lay high over it, like a deep-blue hollow going away down beyond, and filling up with the light. There was no living below for heat, and the showers of cockroaches that went whirring at the lamps, and marching, with their horrid feelers out, straight up your legs; so, fore and aft, the decks were astir with us all. Talk of moonlight on land! but even in the tropics you have to see it pouring right down, as it was then, the whole sky full of it aloft as the moon drew farther up, till it came raining, as it were, in a single sheet from one bend of the horizon to another, the water scarce rippling to the breeze, only heaving in long low swells that you heard just wash her bends; one track brighter than the rest, shining and glancing like a looking-glass drawn out, for a mile or so across our quarter, and the ship's shadow under her other bow. You saw the men far forward in her head, and clustered in a heap on the bowsprit-heel, enjoying it mightily, and looking out or straight aloft, as if to polish their mahogany faces, and get their bushy whiskers silvered; while the awnings being off the poop, the planks in it came out like so much ivory from the shade of the spanker, which sent down a perfect gush of light on everyone moving past. For the air, again, as all the passengers said, it was balmy, though for my part--perhaps it might be a fancy of mine--but now and then I thought it sniffed a little too much _that_ way to be