The Forest Queen rode high at the quayside, having discharged much, and taken on but a moderate amount of cargo for her homeward voyage.  This was already stowed.  She had coaled and was bound to clear by dawn.  Now she rested in idleness, most of her crew taking their pleasure ashore, a Sabbath calm pervading her amid the strident activities going forward on every hand.  The ship’s dog, a curly-haired black retriever, lay on the clean deck in the sunshine stretched on his side, all four legs limp, save when, pestered beyond endurance, he whisked into a sitting position to snap at the all too numerous flies.

The boatswain—­a heavily built East Anglian, born within sight of Boston Stump five-and-forty years ago, his face seamed and pitted by smallpox almost to the extinction of expression and altogether to that of eyebrows, eyelashes and continuity of beard—­spat deliberately and voluminously into the oily, refuse-stained water, lapping against the ship’s side over twenty feet below, and resumed a desultory conversation which for the moment had fallen dead.

“So that’s the reason of his giving us hell’s delight, like he has all day, cleaning up?—­Got a lady coming aboard to tea has he?  If she’s too fine to take us as we are, a deal better let ’er stay ashore, in my opinion.  Stuff a’ nonsense all this set out, dressing up and dressing down.  Vanity at the bottom of it—­and who’s it to take in?—­For a tramp’s a tramp, and a liner’s a liner; and all the water in God’s ocean, and all the rubbing and scrubbing on man’s earth, won’t convert the one into the other, bless you.”

He pointed away, with his pipestem, to the violet-shadowed mouth of one of the narrow lanes opening between the slop-shops, wine-shops, and cheap eating-houses—­their gaudy striped, flounced awnings bellying and straining in the fervid southerly breeze—­which lined the further side of the crowded quay.

“As well try to wash some gutter-bred, French trollop, off the streets in behind there, into a white-souled, white-robed heavenly angel,” he grumbled on.  “All this purifying of the darned old hulk’s so much labour lost.  Gets the men’s monkey up too, putting all this extray work on ’em.”

He leaned down again, folding his arms along the top of the bulwarks.

“And, angel or trollop, I find no use for her, nor any other style of woman either, on board this ’ere blasted rusty iron coffin,” he said.

Whereat the stewart, a pert-eyed, dapper little cockney—­amateur of the violin and noted impersonator of popular music-hall comedians—­took him up in tones of amiable argument.

“Your stomach’s so turned on the subject of females you can’t do ’em justice.  Gone sour, regularly sour, it is.  And I don’t hold with you there, Partington, never shall and never do.  I’m one as can always find a cosy corner in me manly bosom for the lidies—­blame me if I can’t, the pore ’elpless little lovey-doveys.  After all’s said and done Gawd made ’em just as much as ’e made you, Partington, that ’e did.”