"He's made of teak," said the admiring crowd. "Now, there ain't one of us wouldn't be bunged up if we'd been hit about like him, and he ain't got a mark." "It reminds me of a Chinky I fo't once," said one of the men. "I knocked him down seven times, and then two other chaps chucked him out. And next morning he was as cheerful as you please and never fazed; not a mark to him. I give him ten cents for a drink to let me look at him close. Dutchy's just such another, he's a real tough, so he is." Hans's marvellous capacity for being hammered was soon noted aft. "Why don't you take a pillow to him?" said Noyes, with a sneer. "To see you hit him, Bragg, makes me tired, and you used to be a hard man, too." The mate was injured in his tenderest point. "I done my best," he said suddenly. "I carn't help it if the swine is made of injy-rubber. I pretty near skinned my knuckles on him yesterday, and he's as fresh as paint to-day. Try him yourself, sir." "I hired you," retorted Noyes; "but if I do get at him you'll see something fly." They were well to the nor'ard and eastward of the Horn before Noyes happened to try, and it was blowing a snorter from the south-west. As the men came down on the poop after stowing the lower mizzen-topsail, Hans, having gum-boots on, slipped and fell against the skipper. The next moment Hans was on his back and Noyes had his knuckles to his own mouth. "Great Scott!" said Noyes, with a face like a comic door-knocker or a Japanese grotesque, and he turned about and went below. "It serves him right," said Hans. "Oh, no, I ain't hurt. It is nuttin'." And though he showed nothing, not even a slight puffiness on his high cheek-bone, the skipper wore a mitten on his right hand for days. Noyes even conceived a certain respect for the Finn. "I thought I'd hit a bollard," he said. "I ought to have hit him on the jaw, or where he keeps his wind." By dint of these object-lessons Hans gradually got an easier time. If Bragg ever went for him he kicked him, and the marks he made, if he made any, did not show, for Hans came on board clothed, and never undressed till they reached the Line in the Atlantic. There he took a bath. As he said, he always made a point of having some buckets of water thrown over him every time he crossed the equator homeward bound; perhaps he thought it kept him fresh. But by then Bragg was even tired of kicking him. Nothing made him go slower or faster. He went at the pace he had been born to, and he never learnt anything more than he had known at seventeen. If there is any truth in the transmigration of souls, Hans must have been a tortoise and was destined to "jump up" again as a sloth. But once, after a long slow month of provocation, he hit the real Dutchman from Amsterdam, and that native of Holland "went to sleep" for two hours.