The master was an odd garrulous small man, who had a certain number of stated jokes, which, so long as they were endured, he unmercifully inflicted on his messmates. I had come in for my share, as a new comer, as well as the rest; but even with me, although I had been but recently appointed, they had already began to pall, and wax wearisome; and blind as the beetle of a body was, he could not help seeing this. So poor Bang, unable to return a shot, sea-sick and crestfallen, offered a target that he could not resist taking aim at. Dinner was half over, and Bang had not eaten any thing, when, unseasonable as the hour was, the little pot--valiant master, primed with two tumblers of grog, in defiance of the captain’s presence, fairly fastened on him, like a remora, and pinned him down with one of his longwinded stories about Captain David Jones, in the Phantome, during a cruise off Cape Flyaway, having run foul of a whale, and thereby nearly foundered; and that at length having got the monster harpooned and speared, and the devil knows what, but it ended in getting her alongside, when they scuttled the leviathan, and then, wonderful to relate, they found a Greenlandman, with royal yards crossed, in her maw, and the captain and mate in the cabin quarrelling about the reckoning. “What do you think of that, Mr Bang--as well they might be, Mr Bang--as well they might be?” Bang said nothing, but at the moment--whether the said Aaron lent wings to the bird or no I cannot tell--a goose, swimming in apple sauce, which he was, with a most stern countenance, endeavouring to carve, fetched away right over the gunwale of the dish; and taking a whole boat of melted butter with it, splashed across the table during a tremendous roll, that made every thing creak and groan again, right into the small master’s lap who was his vis-a-vis. I could hear Aaron grumble out something about--“Strange affinity-birds of a feather.” But his time was up, his minutes were numbered, and like a shot he bolted from the table, skulling or rather clawing away towards the door, by the backs of the chairs, like a green parrot, until he reached the marine at the bottom of the ladder, at the door of the captain’s cabin, round whose neck he immediately fetterlocked his fins.