The presiding genius of this most primitive of arrangements was a hunchback, a shrewd little Yankee with a French face, who received £11 per month and earned £50. He had one assistant, a nondescript man of indefinite age, who never wore an apron, and whose duties were confined to peeling potatoes, stoking the fire, plucking fowls, and washing up pots. But these things he would do as long as there were any of them _to_ do, mechanically, even though, as was frequently the case, the conditions all about us looked as if another ten minutes would see us all at the bottom of the sea. He earned £5 a month. But what he lacked in ability or initiative was more than made up by his chief. That man was a miracle. On that two-feet slab he would make pastry of all kinds, prepare most elaborate dishes, yes, although the salt spray whistled around him, and on occasion an eddy of the gale would flip a dish with its contents off his board far away to leeward. He would shout an order to his acolyte for half a dozen fowls and a bucket of boiling water. A few rapid motions of the hands, and they were all gyrating in the scuppers, while one after another he plunged them into the steaming bucket and slithered the feathers off, flinging each as he did so to his waiting henchman for the minor picking. Thus I have seen him serve six fowls at noon--at 12.35 they were being eaten. Ask me not how, for the details are unpalatable. But his great achievement was butchering in bad weather--butchering sheep. Stolid Joe would bring the sacrifice along, mercurial Bill would seize it, stab it, and unaided commence to rip off its hide immediately. There, on the deck, outside his galley door, the struggle would go on as if it were a fight to the death, so great was the fury that little man displayed. And it was one of the commonest sights to see, in the midst of the operation, a green comber of a wave come hissing along, embracing carcase and cook, and sweeping them clean off in a dishevelled heap bang aft up against the second-class berths. Knife in one hand, half-skinned sheep gripped by the other, he had no buffers wherewith to ward off bruises; but he had a voice. And he used it, not in canticles of praise. Yet punctually the meal for which that sheep was being prepared would appear on the table. And it would not be an unsavoury dinner, either. The one thing that always seemed to dishearten him was the lifting clean out of its fiery bed of a copper or kettle, that fitted into a hole on the stove-top, by a vicious plunge of the vessel. And as such an event was usually followed by a green sea thundering over all, and flooding him and his lieutenant clean out of the galley amid a smother of steam, coal grit, and spoilt food, his temporary subdual could not be wondered at.