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Lewes, learning to understand the manner of a purser's account, which is very hard and little understood by my fellow officers, and yet mighty necessary. So at last with great content broke up and home to supper and bed. 29th. Lay chiding, and then pleased with my wife in bed, and did consent to her having a new waistcoate made her for that which she lost yesterday.
On the trip out he had licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
Looking up into the purser's face, he said in a low tone, "Please let us fight it out. He'll bully me again, if you don't!" At this the dark boy stopped in his violent attacks on the steward's legs and said, breathlessly: "Well, you ain't such a milksop after all, Ned!" "No, no," said the purser; "no fighting on the Gallia.
"Steward," cried the purser, "take that woman out of the saloon." The whole complement of first-class passengers was now standing up, and many of them saw a plate descend from on high and graze the purser's shoulder. With the celebrity of a sprinter the man of authority from Durham disappeared from the ground-floor and was immediately seen in the gallery.
But come on, Ned, we'll go to the purser's office now." "What for? Is something wrong?" asked Mr. Damon. "No, we just want to see if er if some friends of ours are on board," replied the young inventor, with a quick glance at his chum. "Very well," assented Mr. Damon. "I'll wait for you on deck here. It's quite interesting to watch the sights of the harbor."
"Very well; I'll tell you what I know," he said, and related how he had found the man with the flute loitering about the purser's door. As he finished, Don Sebastian got up. "You made one mistake; you should have given your note to an Englishman and not a young Creole lad. However, we must see if the steamer can be stopped."
"Yes," continued the purser's steward, "I should like to see the fellow who would have done so on shore however, the time will come when I can hagain pull on my plain coat, and then the insult shall be vashed out in blood, Mr Biggs." "And I'll be cursed if I don't some day teach a lesson to the blackguard who stole my trousers."
Well, that will be my fault, then, and I can only regret I did not write down the story when it was told to me, for as I sat in the purser's room that day it seemed to me I had never heard anything more graphic. The purser's room was well forward on the Atlantic steamship. From one of the little red-curtained windows you could look down to where the steerage passengers were gathered on the deck.
Long before this hour, the greater number of the whole ship's company have dressed themselves and are ready for muster; but the never-ending sweepers, the fussy warrant-officers' yeomen, the exact purser's steward, the slovenly midshipmen's boy, the learned loblolly boy, and the interminable host of officers' servants, who have always fifty extra things to do, are often so sorely pressed for time, that at the first tap of the drum beating to divisions, these idlers, as they are technically much miscalled, may often be seen only then lugging their shirts over their heads, or hitching up their trousers in all the hurry-scurry of a lower-deck toilet.
Down on their knees are five hundred men, scrubbing away with brushes and brooms; jostling, and crowding, and quarrelling about using each other's suds; when all their Purser's soap goes to create one indiscriminate yeast. Sometimes you discover that, in the dark, you have been all the while scrubbing your next neighbour's hammock instead of your own.
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