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No tar-bucket is seen on deck, no paint-pot stands in the way, the sailor intermits his weekly task of mending the sails, and the ropes that are to be repaired are laid aside. The deck is scoured white and smooth with sand; everything is clean, even the cabin-boy and the table-cloth, two articles that on weekdays seem to hold themselves privileged to be dirty.
He would have no compensation for the boat that my landslide had crushed. "Oh, but surely," I said, "will you not have some payment for the boat and the tar-bucket and the brush?" "No, my dear Lieutenant," he answered. "How could you think of such a thing?" And he looked at me with hatred in his eyes. For three weeks I saw nothing of Edwarda.
"He'll never set the Thames on fire," observed Paddy Desmond to Archie. "Faith, the men will be after calling him Mr Mildman, unless he condescends to dip those delicate paws of his into the tar-bucket."
They always maintain a tidy exterior; and express an abhorrence of the tar-bucket, into which they are seldom or never called to dip their digits. And pluming themselves upon the cut of their trowsers, and the glossiness of their tarpaulins, from the rest of the ship's company, they acquire the name of "sea-dandies" and "silk-sock-gentry."
The captain took the pumpkin between his legs, and carefully peeled off the whole of its greenish-yellow coat, leaving it a globe of a whitish color. He then asked for the tar-bucket, and, with his fingers, traced various marks, which were pretty accurate outlines of the different continents and the larger islands of the world.
Some young fellows set out in their professional life by making themselves thorough-bred sailors; their hands are familiar with the tar-bucket; their fingers are cut across with the marks of the ropes they have been pulling and hauling; and their whole soul is wrapped up in the intricate science of cutting out sails, and of rigging masts and yards.
"I am curious to know what this person can want with our excellent captain it can scarcely be one of the Montauk's crew!" "I will answer for it, that the fellow has not enough seamanship about him to whip a rope," said Paul, laughing; "for if there be two temporal pursuits that have less affinity than any two others, they are those of the pantry and the tar-bucket.
"He makes all the youngsters lie out in the topsail-yards, and hand the canvas in fine style, ay, and black down the rigging at times too. By Jove, he's the fellow to make your kid-glove-wearing gentlemen dip their hands in the tar-bucket, and keep them there, if he sees they are in any way squeamish about it."
"Good night," she murmured. In a few minutes her soft regular breathing told me that she was asleep. I went forward and seated myself in a tar-bucket, with my head against the mast, to get what sleep I could. But for some time why, I do not know sleep would not come. The image of Edith Croyden filled my mind.
We can't teach him much yet, you'll all allow, and the Captain says as how he'll give nine dozen to any man as puts a quid of baccy in the younker's mouth; so we can't even learn him to chaw yet, which to my mind he'd do better nor anything else, as he's most practice with his jaws just yet; but the time will come when he can use his fists, too, and the sooner he gets 'em into the tar-bucket the better, says I." This opinion was loudly applauded by all present.
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