Suddenly we were becalmed.  There had been a fine breeze up to three o’clock in the afternoon and the ship had made as much as two knots an hour when without a word of warning the sails began to belly the wrong way, owing to the impetus that the ship had acquired; and then, as this expired, they hung as limp and lifeless as the skirts of a clawhammer coat.  The Camel not only stood stock still but moved a little backward toward England.  Old Ben the boatswain said that he’d never knowed but one deader calm, and that, he explained, was when Preacher Jack, the reformed sailor, had got excited in a sermon in a seaman’s chapel and shouted that the Archangel Michael would chuck the Dragon into the brig and give him a taste of the rope’s-end, damn his eyes!

We lay in this woful state for the better part of a year, when, growing impatient, the crew deputed me to look up the captain and see if something could not be done about it.  I found him in a remote cobwebby corner between-decks, with a book in his hand.  On one side of him, the cords newly cut, were three bales of “Ouida”; on the other a mountain of Miss M.E.  Braddon towered above his head.  He had finished “Ouida” and was tackling Miss Braddon.  He was greatly changed.

“Captain Abersouth,” said I, rising on tiptoe so as to overlook the lower slopes of Mrs. Braddon, “will you be good enough to tell me how long this thing is going on?”

“Can’t say, I’m sure,” he replied without pulling his eyes off the page.  “They’ll probably make up about the middle of the book.  In the meantime old Pondronummus will foul his top-hamper and take out his papers for Looney Haven, and young Monshure de Boojower will come in for a million.  Then if the proud and fair Angelica doesn’t luff and come into his wake after pizening that sea lawyer, Thundermuzzle, I don’t know nothing about the deeps and shallers of the human heart.”

I could not take so hopeful a view of the situation, and went on deck, feeling very much discouraged.  I had no sooner got my head out than I observed that the ship was moving at a high rate of speed!

We had on board a bullock and a Dutchman.  The bullock was chained by the neck to the foremast, but the Dutchman was allowed a good deal of liberty, being shut up at night only.  There was bad blood between the two—­a feud of long standing, having its origin in the Dutchman’s appetite for milk and the bullock’s sense of personal dignity; the particular cause of offense it would be tedious to relate.  Taking advantage of his enemy’s afternoon siesta, the Dutchman had now managed to sneak by him, and had gone out on the bowsprit to fish.  When the animal waked and saw the other creature enjoying himself he straddled his chain, leveled his horns, got his hind feet against the mast and laid a course for the offender.  The chain was strong, the mast firm, and the ship, as Byron says, “walked the water like a thing of course.”