But I must forbear. Mental pictures of that super-excellent cook's doings arise before me in almost interminable succession, tempting me to forget the fact that there were many others doing almost precisely the same things unsung, and unrewarded save by the meagre pay they drew. Who, for instance, could envy the cook of a "weekly" tramp?--a steamer, that is, which, making quite long voyages, has engaged her crew at so much a week and find themselves. Perhaps there are no cooks at sea who are more worried than these. For Jack, left to his own devices for supplying himself with food, does some of the queerest things that ever were or could be recorded. And each individual expects his own mess to be as carefully looked after as a whole saloon dinner. Natural, perhaps, on his part, but for the hapless cook purgatorially inconvenient. I was once a passenger from an Irish port to Liverpool in a weekly boat, and in the grey of the dawn was waiting at the galley door to buy a cup of coffee. Men came and went incessantly, banging oven doors and flinging utensils from side to side of the red-hot stove-top. The cook was absent, engaged aft in some business or other. Presently he appeared with a teapot, and immediately snatched at a huge copper kettle which stood on the stove in the middle, where the top plate was almost transparent with heat. The kettle flew up in his grasp, being empty. "Why, there's nothin' in it!" he screamed. "No," replied a fireman who was groping in the starboard oven; "I tried it ten minutes ago, and it was empty then." "An' you putt it back on that stove!" said the cook tragically. "Course I did," was the calm reply; "think I was goin' ter fill it?" I really thought the cook would have died of suppressed emotion before he found words wherein to express himself. But his tongue was loosened presently, and then his remarks, if sulphurous, were fairly comprehensive. The fireman only laughed.