“Look sharp with your work there, John Want!” says the sailor.  “Lieutenant Crayford is just coming in to look after you.”

With this warning the messenger disappears again.  John Want rises with a groan, turns the chest up on one end, and begins to fasten the cord round it.  The ship’s cook is not a man to look back on his rescue with the feeling of unmitigated satisfaction which animates his companions in trouble.  On the contrary, he is ungratefully disposed to regret the North Pole.

“If I had only known”—­thus runs the train of thought in the mind of John Want—­“if I had only known, before I was rescued, that I was to be brought to this place, I believe I should have preferred staying at the North Pole.  I was very happy keeping up everybody’s spirits at the North Pole.  Taking one thing with another, I think I must have been very comfortable at the North Pole—­if I had only known it.  Another man in my place might be inclined to say that this Newfoundland boat-house was rather a sloppy, slimy, draughty, fishy sort of a habitation to take shelter in.  Another man might object to perpetual Newfoundland fogs, perpetual Newfoundland cod-fish, and perpetual Newfoundland dogs.  We had some very nice bears at the North Pole.  Never mind! it’s all one to me—­I don’t grumble.”

“Have you done cording that box?”

This time the voice is a voice of authority—­the man at the doorway is Lieutenant Crayford himself.  John Want answers his officer in his own cheerful way.

“I’ve done it as well as I can, sir—­but the damp of this place is beginning to tell upon our very ropes.  I say nothing about our lungs—­I only say our ropes.”

Crayford answers sharply.  He seems to have lost his former relish for the humor of John Want.

“Pooh!  To look at your wry face, one would think that our rescue from the Arctic regions was a downright misfortune.  You deserve to be sent back again.”

“I could be just as cheerful as ever, sir, if I was sent back again; I hope I’m thankful; but I don’t like to hear the North Pole run down in such a fishy place as this.  It was very clean and snowy at the North Pole—­and it’s very damp and sandy here.  Do you never miss your bone-soup, sir? I do.  It mightn’t have been strong; but it was very hot; and the cold seemed to give it a kind of a meaty flavor as it went down.  Was it you that was a-coughing so long last night, sir?  I don’t presume to say anything against the air of these latitudes; but I should be glad to know it wasn’t you that was a-coughing so hollow.  Would you be so obliging as just to feel the state of these ropes with the ends of your fingers, sir?  You can dry them afterward on the back of my jacket.”

“You ought to have a stick laid on the back of your jacket.  Take that box down to the boat directly.  You croaking vagabond!  You would have grumbled in the Garden of Eden.”

The philosopher of the Expedition was not a man to be silenced by referring him to the Garden of Eden.  Paradise itself was not perfect to John Want.