"My boy, bad grub," and Hitchen, to whom I had put the question, dwelt lovingly on the words, "bad grub"! "Bad grub is Act of Parliament rations of so much, or I should say, so little, meat, either salt pork or beef taken from the pickle in the harness casks and weighed on a rusty scales by the second greaser each day, and given out to the crew. So much flour, so much pease, and so much hard tack. All rationed out with the whack of water, and carried to a filthy galley where the unappetizing slops is cooked up in some tropic region, and served to the British merchant sailor with a regulation dram of lime juice, just calculated to keep the scurvy out of his knuckle joints. That is bad grub. Yes, we have about the same scale here, but you don't see them follow it so close. The American shipowner knows better, he wants to get a lot of work out of his crew, to keep his ship up and to make fast passages; he knows he must feed the gang to make them do it without chucking overboard a lot of corpses. I tell you, lad, bad grub is a rotten dish, but not a rare one. When your meat sours, and the filthy flour is full of blue mold, say, you are getting it rich then. Did you ever drink sour goat's milk? No? Well, bad grub is as bad as that." "That sounds bad, but how about the weevils?" I asked, thinking he had forgotten our white worms. "Weevils! Why, weevils are a sign of good grub. Grub fit to feed weevils is tip-top fodder. See how nice and fat they get. A mess of fresh weevils is simply another way of getting your game with the taste of white plump meat." "You make me sick, Hitchen," I burst out, as I dropped over the edge of the top and down onto the futtock shrouds. I gained the deck fairly nauseated--a near seasickness, a malady that otherwise never troubled me. My stomach was as empty as the famous cupboard, and with the keen sea air and the healthy appetite of a boy of eighteen, I was famished as I went forward to supper, but Hitchen's philosophy of food values so upset me that I could eat nothing but a piece of selected tack, one free from holes that I was fortunate enough to find in the bread barge. After that I steered clear of food discussions, and tried to forget the whole subject; it was hardly worth while talking about anyhow. We confined ourselves to talk about _timenocles_, _catharpins_, and of the best way to _thoroughfoot_ a rope. Frenchy, who had sailed in the Mediterranean a good deal, told us of the strange craft called a _ybeck_, her mainsail having a large button in the belly of it, to hold in the bulge of the sail, somewhat after the manner of our midship tack.