II

It is only by inadvertence that I have omitted the information that the vessel in which I was now a pervading influence was the Bonnyclabber (Troutbeck, master), of Malvern Heights.

The Bonnyclabber’s reactionary course had now brought her to the spot at which I had taken passage.  Passengers and crew, fatigued by their somewhat awkward attempts to manifest their gratitude for our miraculous deliverance from the cloud-bank, were snoring peacefully in unconsidered attitudes about the deck, when the lookout man, perched on the supreme extremity of the mainmast, consuming a cold sausage, began an apparently preconcerted series of extraordinary and unimaginable noises.  He coughed, sneezed, and barked simultaneously—­bleated in one breath, and cackled in the next—­sputteringly shrieked, and chatteringly squealed, with a bass of suffocated roars.  There were desolutory vocal explosions, tapering off in long wails, half smothered in unintelligible small-talk.  He whistled, wheezed, and trumpeted; began to sharp, thought better of it and flatted; neighed like a horse, and then thundered like a drum!  Through it all he continued making incomprehensible signals with one hand while clutching his throat with the other.  Presently he gave it up, and silently descended to the deck.

By this time we were all attention; and no sooner had he set foot amongst us, than he was assailed with a tempest of questions which, had they been visible, would have resembled a flight of pigeons.  He made no reply—­not even by a look, but passed through our enclosing mass with a grim, defiant step, a face deathly white, and a set of the jaw as of one repressing an ambitious dinner, or ignoring a venomous toothache.  For the poor man was choking!

Passing down the companion-way, the patient sought the surgeon’s cabin, with the ship’s company at his heels.  The surgeon was fast asleep, the lark-like performance at the masthead having been inaudible in that lower region.  While some of us were holding a whisky-bottle to the medical nose, in order to apprise the medical intelligence of the demand upon it, the patient seated himself in statuesque silence.  By this time his pallor, which was but the mark of a determined mind, had given place to a fervent crimson, which visibly deepened into a pronounced purple, and was ultimately superseded by a clouded blue, shot through with opalescent gleams, and smitten with variable streaks of black.  The face was swollen and shapeless, the neck puffy.  The eyes protruded like pegs of a hat-stand.

Pretty soon the doctor was got awake, and after making a careful examination of his patient, remarking that it was a lovely case of stopupagus oesophagi, took a tool and set to work, producing with no difficulty a cold sausage of the size, figure, and general bearing of a somewhat self-important banana.  The operation had been performed amid breathless silence, but the moment it was concluded the patient, whose neck and head had visibly collapsed, sprang to his feet and shouted: