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Tooker, whom I have brought into the Navy to serve us as a husband to see goods timely shipped off from hence to the Fleete and other places, and took him with me to Woolwich and Deptford, where by business I have been hindered a great while of going, did a very great deale of business, and home, and there by promise find Creed, and he and my wife, Mercer and I by coach to take the ayre; and, where we had formerly been, at Hackney, did there eat some pullets we carried with us, and some things of the house; and after a game or two at shuffle-board, home, and Creed lay with me; but, being sleepy, he had no mind to talk about business, which indeed I intended, by inviting him to lie with me, but I would not force it on him, and so to bed, he and I, and to sleep, being the first time I have been so much at my ease and taken so much fresh ayre these many weeks or months.
They sat on the piazza together reading different parts of the same newspaper for an hour after breakfast; went to the boardwalk and turned in at a shuffle-board hall, where they spent another hour making the weights slide along the sanded board and then took another ocean bath. After luncheon they walked up the boardwalk to the iron pier.
In the first place, he noticed that the shuffle-board and quoit players, on the boat deck aft, were occasionally annoyed by cinders from the stacks, so he made it a general plan to steer so that the smoke blew at right angles to the ship's course. As the wind was prevailingly west, this meant that his general trend was southerly.
Perkins fell quickly among such a set, and often rambled abroad with them on the usual errands of whoring, shuffle-board, or skittle-playing, etc.
"I've been down to No. 45 four times this morning, and there's nobody there but that stupid Matilda, and she doesn't know or won't tell when Polly will get through reading to that tiresome old man. And they won't let me go to his state-room. Mrs. Fisher and your father are there, too, or I'd get them to make Polly come out on deck. We all want her for a game of shuffle-board." Jasper sighed.
Something about his sour, introspective aloofness displeased the onlooker, who shortly returned to the deck. The day was warming up, and on the sunny side of the ship the steamer chairs were filling. Two old men were casting quoits; a noisy quartette was playing shuffle-board.
You become, in time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes about wishing "he vas a veek older;" and the eccentric man, who looks at no one, and streaks about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose, and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the deck occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin door, washes himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his state-room, saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed, as if the hard narrow, uneasy shelf of a berth was anything like a bed! and you have heard at last pretty nearly all about the officers, and their twenty and thirty years of sea-life, and every ocean and port on the habitable globe where they have been.
The young person had gotten hopelessly on his nerves; in fact, she was the most disturbing object on the horizon. She played shuffle-board in front of his chair when he wanted to read; she practised new dance-steps with the first officer when he wanted to sleep; she caused him to lift his unwilling eyes a dozen times an hour by her endless circuits of the deck.
She proved herself an excellent sailor, and was never tired of playing shuffle-board on the deck or pacing to and fro with Uncle Bob in the fresh breeze. And when at last Gibraltar was reached and she actually beheld the coasts of Spain, Africa and Italy, her wonder grew until she said she had to pinch herself to be sure she was alive and not dreaming. It was a journey of marvels.
He soon comes to accept whatever happens as directly due to the war even when the deck steward tells him he cannot play shuffle-board because, owing to the war, there is no chalk. In times of peace to get to this city from Paris did not require more than six days, but now, owing to the war, in making the distance we wasted fifteen.
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