"It's no use for him to talk," said the cooper after Fisher was gone. "If he goes whaling as long as I have been, perhaps he'll see an eating whale. I reckon it's breezing on by the sound on deck. Yes, down goes the coil of the maintopsail halyards, and here they come stamping aft. I think the wind will haul ahead before morning, and then we may as well make out our log for three or four weeks, beating and banging to get round the horn. Well, it's all in the course of a voyage. I was seventy days off the Cape in the Bajazet, and it never lulled enough to get the fore and mizzen topsails on her." "Must have been pleasant," I muttered, half asleep. "Pleasant! yes. Plenty to eat, and nothing to do but wear round now and then. The worst of it was, the ship was so crank we had to travel on our ankles altogether, and when it did moderate, we'd lost the power of using our feet like human--" I was by this time fast locked, and I presume that my snoring reminded the inveterate yarn-spinner that he might as well follow suit as to waste his breath. His predictions proved more reliable that his narratives; for when our watch turned out, the ship was under double reefs with the wind at south-west, and squally. There was nothing to do, however, unless it "breezed on" harder. So, after seeing that the watch were all within call and the lookout set, we made ourselves comfortable under the hurricane house for the new ship boasted that appendage among her modern improvements. "When I first went to sea," said Father Grafton, "we would have laughed at the notion of building such a covering as this, as we would at many other things which are now quite common, and which, a few years hence, will be looked upon as necessary. There's the patent windlass: it's the first one that I have been shipmate with, but I suppose after I have been this voyage, I should hardly know how to go to sea again with an old-fashioned back-breaker. Why, on my first voyage, we didn't even have purchase bars at the windlass ends; nothing but the handspikes, and it was heave, Dick, and heave, Tom, for I hove last." "And yet you used to get large whales and cut them in," said Mr. Bunker.