After that we kept the Dutchman right where he was, night and day, the old Camel making better speed than she had ever done in the most favorable gale.  We held due south.

We had now been a long time without sufficient food, particularly meat.  We could spare neither the bullock nor the Dutchman; and the ship’s carpenter, that traditional first aid to the famished, was a mere bag of bones.  The fish would neither bite nor be bitten.  Most of the running-tackle of the ship had been used for macaroni soup; all the leather work, our shoes included, had been devoured in omelettes; with oakum and tar we had made fairly supportable salad.  After a brief experimental career as tripe the sails had departed this life forever.  Only two courses remained from which to choose; we could eat one another, as is the etiquette of the sea, or partake of Captain Abersouth’s novels.  Dreadful alternative!—­but a choice.  And it is seldom, I think, that starving sailormen are offered a shipload of the best popular authors ready-roasted by the critics.

We ate that fiction.  The works that the captain had thrown aside lasted six months, for most of them were by the best-selling authors and were pretty tough.  After they were gone—­of course some had to be given to the bullock and the Dutchman—­we stood by the captain, taking the other books from his hands as he finished them.  Sometimes, when we were apparently at our last gasp, he would skip a whole page of moralizing, or a bit of description; and always, as soon as he clearly foresaw the denouement—­which he generally did at about the middle of the second volume—­the work was handed over to us without a word of repining.

The effect of this diet was not unpleasant but remarkable.  Physically, it sustained us; mentally, it exalted us; morally, it made us but a trifle worse than we were.  We talked as no human beings ever talked before.  Our wit was polished but without point.  As in a stage broadsword combat, every cut has its parry, so in our conversation every remark suggested the reply, and this necessitated a certain rejoinder.  The sequence once interrupted, the whole was bosh; when the thread was broken the beads were seen to be waxen and hollow.

We made love to one another, and plotted darkly in the deepest obscurity of the hold.  Each set of conspirators had its proper listener at the hatch.  These, leaning too far over would bump their heads together and fight.  Occasionally there was confusion amongst them:  two or more would assert a right to overhear the same plot.  I remember at one time the cook, the carpenter, the second assistant-surgeon, and an able seaman contended with handspikes for the honor of betraying my confidence.  Once there were three masked murderers of the second watch bending at the same instant over the sleeping form of a cabin-boy, who had been heard to mutter, a week previously, that he had “Gold! gold!” the accumulation of eighty—­yes, eighty—­years’ piracy on the high seas, while sitting as M.P. for the borough of Zaccheus-cum-Down, and attending church regularly.  I saw the captain of the foretop surrounded by suitors for his hand, while he was himself fingering the edge of a packing-case, and singing an amorous ditty to a lady-love shaving at a mirror.