"Mark me," said Jack gloomily, "you'll never have no tombstone if we ships in the _Pandora_. 'Tain't her way to run any man's relatives into _that_ expense." But Joe shrugged his shoulders. "Mebbe this trip'll break her luck; and you've got to ship along. 'Cause why? We've on'y one chest atween the two of us. Cheer up, old son. Why, I'd ship in the _Leander_, and they say she killed and drownded seventy men in five years. Blow me, I've got to the p'int that I'd ship in a blooming diving-bell!" And three days later the two men, with twelve others who were just as deep in debt to the boarding-house keepers, signed on for the _Pandora_, bound for London. They went on board that very night. The mates kept a keen eye on them: they knew the ship's reputation and more than once men who had come on board at night had disappeared by the morning. The first few hours in any ship, as in any other kind of work, are the most trying, and the first sight of a damp and empty foc'sle is for ever discouraging. For all the _Pandora's_ crowd from London had "skipped" in Melbourne. "And right they was," said more than one of the new crowd, "for one of them was killed, and two was drowned, and another will walk lame for the rest of his life." But when the sun came up over the low brown hills to the eastward, and the daylight danced upon the landlocked waters of the great bay, they turned to with more cheerful hearts. The summer had spent two of its golden months, but the sky was clear, and a warm north wind blew. The ship was clean, and yet not too clean. It did not suggest the interminable intolerable labour of an American ship, all brass and bright-work. And as the new crew hove up the anchor they found the windlass was no heart-breaker. "Give it her, boys," said the mate, and they slapped the brakes up and down with a will. "I reckon the crowd aft are pretty decent," said Joe, as he jumped up aloft to loosen the fore-topsail. "Oh, I dessay she ain't 'arf bad." And as the crew allowed, there was little to complain of about the way the _Pandora_ was found. "She ain't like our last ship," was Joe's comment. "Every time she 'it a sea out o' the common she'd shake shearpoles off of 'er, as a dog shakes water." But Jack Marchmont was not consoled. "I ain't denyin' that the owners and the old man do their best," he said, "but if they rove silk gear and bent silk sails, they'd not alter the nature of her. I'll feel safe when I grinds gravel under my heels, and not till then." They told each other dolorous tales of the ship when they ate, and in the second dog-watch, which was all their own. And yet the wind was fair and put them through Bass's Strait, and well to the south and east, day by day. "It's too good to last," said Jack.