OFF TO THE JAPAN GROUNDS. 155 



we always persisted in calling him from inability to 

 pronounce his proper name — his case was evidently 

 hopeless. His fellows did their poor best to comfort his 

 fast-fleeting hours, one after another murmuring to him 

 the prayers of the Church, which, although they did 

 not understand them, they evidently believed most firmly 

 to have some marvellous power to open the gates of 

 paradise and cleanse the sinner. Notwithstanding the 

 grim fact that their worship was almost pure super- 

 stition, it was far more in accordance with the fitness 

 of things for a dying man's surroundings than such 

 scenes as I have witnessed in the forecastles of merchant 

 ships when poor sailors lay a-dying. I remember well 

 once, when I was second officer of a large passenger 

 ship, going in the forecastle as she lay at anchor at St. 

 Helena, to see a sick man. Half the crew were drunk, 

 and the beastly kennel in which they lived was in a thick 

 fog of tobacco-smoke and the stale stench of rum. Eibald 

 songs, quarrelling, and blasphemy made a veritable 

 pandemonium of the place. I passed quietly through it 

 to the sick man's bunk, and found him — dead ! He had 

 passed away in the midst of that, but the horror of it did 

 not seem to impress his bemused shipmates much. 



Here, at any rate, there was quiet and decorum, 

 while all that could be done for the poor sufferer (not 

 much, from ignorance of how he was injured) was done. 

 He was released from his pain in the afternoon of the 

 second day after the accident, the end coming suddenly 

 and peacefully. The same evening, at sunset, the body, 

 neatly sewn up in canvas, with a big lump of sandstone 

 secured to the feet, was brought on deck, laid on a 

 hatch at the gangway, and covered with the blue, star- 

 spangled American Jack. Then all hands were mustered 



