“I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said.

“We have all the b-b-better appetite,” responded the doctor.

“If, as the old saw says, the time to eat is when the stomach rings the bell, I am ready!” the captain piped, in his high-pitched voice.

“Diogenes being asked what time a man ought to eat, responded, ’The rich, when he is hungry, and the poor, when he has food,’” said the judge, whose mind threw up old scraps of classical knowledge as the ocean throws up shells.

“As for hunger, my appetite is sharper than a scythe; but my indigestion is duller than a whetstone,” said the mate, to whom a feast was always prophetic of subsequent fasting.

“Good digestion waits on appetite; but waits too long, eh?” the judge replied.

The captain led the way to the cabin.  It was a low, dingy room, but ruddy with the light of a dozen tallow candles.  On the table was spread a feast that would have tempted the palates of the epicures who gathered about the festive board of the immortal Lucullus.  There was neither art nor display in the accompaniments of the food, but every luxury that an ample market could supply had been prepared by a cook who could have won immortality in a Paris restaurant, and the finest whisky that could be distilled in old Kentucky, the rarest wines that could be imported from the Rhine or from sunny Italian slopes, were ready to flow.

Four slaves received the banqueters and then took their places behind the chairs at the table.  The captain’s face was shining like a full moon; the doctor’s was swarthy, sinister and piratical; the judge’s possessed the dignity of a splendid ruin; the mate’s was haunted by an expression of unsatisfied and insatiable desire.  Observing it and calling the attention of the others, the justice remarked, “Like the old Romans, we have a skeleton at our table to remind us of death.”

“You would look like death yourself if you had to sit staring at these bounties like a muzzled dog in a market,” snarled the mate.

“Be like the dyspeptic who was about to be hanged,” said the doctor.  “The sheriff asked him to make his last request.  ’I will have a dozen hot waffles well b-b-buttered; and let there be a full dozen, for I shall not suffer from the cramps t-t-this time,’ says he.”

The first few courses of the feast were eaten in almost uninterrupted silence; but as the keen edge of their appetites became a little dulled, the tongues of the banqueters were unloosed and a torrent of talk began to flow, interlarded with oaths and stories of a more than questionable character.  Corks popped from bottles with loud explosions, the darkies greeted the sallies of wit with boisterous laughter and surreptitiously emptied the glasses.