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"Shiver my timbers if 'tain't my old sea-kit," interrupted the sailor, rearing himself aloft in the water like a spaniel in search of wounded waterfowl. "Sure as my name's Ben Brace it be that, an' nothing else!" "Your sea-chess?" interrogated Snowball, elevating his woolly cranium above the water, so as also to command a view. "Golly! I b'lieve it am. How he come dar? You leff 'im on de raff?"
But to the knot of his sea-kit there was tied a bunch of cottage-flowers sweet williams, boy's love, love-lies-bleeding, a few common striped carnations, and a rose or two and the sight and smell of them in that frowsy 'bus were like tears on thirsty eyelids.
It might have occurred sooner, had his mind not been monopolised with the hope of being able to row the raft to windward. Failing in this, however, his next idea was to throw something overboard, something that might afford a support to the swimmers struggling in the water. The first object that came under his eyes promising such rapport was the sea-kit of the sailor.
"Didn't I tell you?" he cried, appealing to us. "Didn't I tell you?" "It might have been no laughing matter for us," the other remarked petulantly. "I have lost a good sea-kit and nearly my life into the bargain." "Do I understand you to say," said I, "that you attribute your misfortunes to your ill-fated passengers?" The mate opened his eyes at the adjective. "Why ill-fated, sir?" he asked.
We pile the men on to the troop-decks, stack the rifles in the racks, send down the sea-kit, steam about for a few hours, and land 'em somewhere. It's a good notion, because our army to be any use must be an army of embarkation. Why, last Whit Monday we had how many were down at the dock-edge in the first eight hours? Kyd, you're the Volunteer enthusiast last from school."
"In the first ten hours over a hundred and eighteen thousand," said Kyd across the table, "with thirty-six thousand actually put in and taken out of ship. In the whole thirty-six hours we had close on ninety thousand men on the water and a hundred and thirty-three thousand on the quays fallen in with their sea-kit." "That must have been a sight," I said. "One didn't notice it much.
Long before they had any intention of abandoning the dead body of the whale, in fact shortly after taking possession of it, Ben Brace, assisted by Snowball and little William, the latter having also mounted upon the monster's back, cut open the great cavity of the "case" with the axe; and then inserting a large tin pot, which had turned up in the sailor's sea-kit, drew it put again full of liquid spermaceti.
Lilly Lalee was on the top of the sea-kit; Snowball and Ben Brace were flanking it, one at each end. The chest was supporting all three. Hurrah! they were saved! Little William, at that moment, felt certain they would be saved; though that joyful certainty had not yet been communicated to them.
Carefully extracting the bung, which, in the lashing of the keg, had been purposely kept upwards, he inserted a dipper, that is to say, a small tin vessel, or drinking "taut," which had turned up among the stores of the sea-kit, and which, having been already used for the same purpose, was provided with a piece of cord attached around its rim, like the vessel in use among the gaugers or wine-merchants for drawing their wine from the wood.
Only the sea-kit that by this time had got several hundred fathoms to windward, cask Number 1 a little nearer, and Number 2 still nearer. These, however, strung out in a line, enabled him to conjecture the direction in which the swimmers, if still above water, should be found. Indeed, it was something more definite than a conjecture. Rather was it a certainty.
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