ALL IN A DAY'S WORK 173 



food, every bucket and pan in the galley. They will man the 

 mastheads and go cruising through the seas where whales 

 abound, and lower and chase and strike and lance and cut and 

 boil again and again, till with every cask full and coopered, if 

 fortune serves them well, they heave overboard the try-works, 

 scrub and scrape her till she is as clean as human hands can 

 make her, and sail with a full ship to the home port. But now 

 they are boiling through the day and the short twilight far into 

 the night. 



As the evil-smelling smoke drifts down the wind and the 

 flames from the try-works leap high into the night, while the 

 men feed the fires and bail oil from try-pot into cooler, and from 

 cooler into cask; while the mincers chop the horse-pieces into 

 Bible-leaves and send them forward to refill the pots, the vessel 

 is grotesquely ht by dancing flames, now gleaming lurid through 

 the smoke and dimming the steady lanterns by their glare; now 

 momentarily dying while the lantern-light, relieved from ruth- 

 less competition, shines for an interval as if with renewed 

 strength. The men who pass and repass in black silhouette 

 are as creatures of the underworld, and to a stranger who knew 

 nothing of her business, the vessel herself would appear as a 

 visitant from the other side of Styx. 



