Coming down from this task, I was in time to witness a burst of profanity on the part of the mate. "Keep moving, you beach-combing ---- ---- ----! Every lousy ---- ---- ---- ----! I won't have no 'lime juice' sleeping on deck this voyage. D'ye hear that?" All heard, for there was a shuffle of weary feet about the main hatch, where several of the watch had perched comfortably in the dark, and, after a moment of indecision, sprinkled with derogatory mutterings, we paired off in little groups of twos, walking the swaying deck wherever we could find places free from the back draft of the sails. Frenchy was my first chum on the _Fuller_, and though for periods we drifted apart, through sheer mutual exhaustion of our interchangeable ideas, yet we always came together again. Somehow, on the very start of the voyage, when the crimps and runners bade us that sad farewell from the port of New York, we were drawn together. The night that we paired off, on our first watch at sea, it seemed natural that Frenchy and I should elect to stump the deck in company. We preempted a path from the lee main pin rail to the after end of the forward house. "It's better here than anywhere," remarked Frenchy, and I soon found he was right, as we missed the draft from the mains'l and were partly sheltered by the house on the forward leg of our walk. [Illustration: Frenchy] Frenchy was a heavy-whiskered, ruddy specimen, sporting the square-cut beard of the French sailor. He was an ex-naval man, and one time prison guard in the penal settlement of New Caledonia. Trained to the sea since boyhood, in the fishing fleet of Dunkirk, for many years a rigger in the naval yards at Brest, a sailor man on every type of craft from the Mediterranean ybeck to a ship. Victor Mathes was one of the finest types of the Gallic seaman. His life was a vague and many folded nebula of romance. He was full of stories of the life in New Caledonia, of the discipline on the outlying islands, of punitive expeditions, and of the intrigues and jealousies among the checkered lives that wear themselves away in those distant places.