Still, things went on pretty smoothly on board while the calm lasted, despite the little roughnesses which the second mate's way of evincing his authority produced--and which I could not avoid noticing, for I'm sure he used to be "down" on me whenever he had a chance of calling me to account for going where I had no business to, as I confess I sometimes did, although I used to be encouraged by the men, and Mr Marline would wink at my escapades. We all found it terribly dull, though; for, even the fish were too lazy to come to the surface to be caught, and so we were deprived therefore of our old pastime of angling for them from the bowsprit in the afternoons and evenings. Day after day, the _Josephine_ rolled her hull from port to starboard and then back again to port on the tumid sea, which, save throbbing with a dull heavy swell, had now lost all its life and action:--day after day we looked in vain for a breeze from sunrise to sunset; day after day our watchful longing was all in vain; there, day after day, for over a week, we rolled and lay! Captain Miles used to come up regularly on the poop at noon to take the sun, from a sense of duty; but it was almost a useless task, as we hardly varied a mile in our position from the commencement of the calm, the vessel remaining close in with the fiftieth parallel of longitude and in latitude thirty-two North. Mr Marline liked to chaff the captain about this, telling him that his sextant wanted polishing up a bit and that the glasses were wrong. However, that all went for nothing with his chief, who well knew where the fault lay, fully understanding that the instrument was not to blame; but, as regularly as he brought out the sextant he used to laugh at Mr Marline's stereotyped joke. As related in Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner":-- "Day after day, day after day We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean!" Had it not been for the two darkeys, Jake and Cuffee, I don't know what we should have done for fun. These comical fellows were a constant source of amusement to us; for, although they did not come to fisticuffs again, they were always quarrelling and making friends afterwards in the oddest way possible. Their disputes usually arose from some little trifle concerning their order of precedence, each being highly jealous of his dignity, and resenting in a moment any fancied slight or want of proper respect on the part of the other.