Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs taken chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible to reconstruct the _S.S. Vesta_ in all her dismalness. You have seen scores of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the world. You have only to picture an old, two-masted, well-decked tramp with smokestack and foul clutter of bridge-house amidships, and fore and aft a miserable bit of a deck broken by hatches and capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions and chains and other unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual promenader. From the photographs and letters I learned that the dog-hole, intended by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha, was away aft, beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch of the propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy, bunked in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence for having been spared so dreadful an experience. Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For instance, here is an extract from one of his letters: "It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the time. Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work till you sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just see Liosha. Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor like her, and that was the daughter of a trader sailing among the Islands, who had lived all her life since birth on his ship and had scarcely slept ashore. She's as much born to it as any shell-back on board. She has the amazing gift of looking part of the tub, like the stokers and the man at the wheel. Unlike another woman, she's never in the way, and the more work you can give her to do, the happier she is. She's in magnificent health and as strong as a horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of her; now she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep her from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on as cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and between the cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and tell her about their wives and their girls and what rotten food they've got--'Everybody has got rotten food on board ship, you silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What do you expect--sweetbreads and ices?'--and what soul-shattering blighters they've shipped with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly imaginary) they have performed in pursuit of their perilous calling. They're all children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them, these hell-tearing fellows--children afflicted with a perpetual thirst and a craving to punch heads--and Liosha's a child, too; so there's a kind of freemasonry between them.