He was still sleeping, so that I could satisfy my keen curiosity without rudeness.  He had indeed given up the only bit of space to me, and was himself doubled up among lumber in a fashion that must have been very trying to the length of his limbs.  For he was taller than I, though not, I thought, much older; two years or so, perhaps.  The cut of his clothes (not their raggedness, though they were ragged as well as patched) confirmed me in my conviction that he was “not exactly a gentleman”; but I felt a little puzzled about him, for, broad as his accent was, he was even less exactly of the Tim Binder and Bob Furniss class.

He was not good-looking, and yet I hardly know any word that would so fittingly describe his face in the repose of sleep, and with that bit of light concentrated upon it, as the word “noble.”  It was drawn and pinched with pain and the endurance of pain, and I never saw anything so thin, except his hands, which lay close to his sides—­both clenched.  But I do think he would have been handsome if his face had not been almost aggressively intelligent when awake, and if his eyebrows and eyelashes had had any colour.  His hair was fair but not bright, and it was straight without being smooth, and tossed into locks that had no grace or curl.  And why he made me think of a Bible picture—­Jacob lying at the foot of the ladder to heaven, or something of that sort—­I could not tell, and did not puzzle myself to wonder, for the ship was moving, and there was a great deal to be seen out of the window, tiny as it was.

It looked on to the dock, where men were running about in the old bewildering fashion.  To-day it was not so bewildering to me, because I could see that the men were working with some purpose that affected our vessel, though the directions in which they ran, dragging ropes as thick as my leg, to the grinding of equally monstrous chains, were as mysterious as the figures of some dance one does not know.  As to the noises they made, men and boys anywhere are given to help on their work with sounds of some sort, but I could not have believed in anything approaching to these, out of a lunatic asylum, unless I had heard them.

I could hear quite well, I could hear what was said, and a great deal of it, I am sorry to say, would have been better unsaid.  But the orders which rang out interested me, for I tried to fit them on to what followed, though without much result.  At last the dock seemed to be moving away from me—­I saw men, but not the same men—­and every man’s eye was fixed on us.  Then the thick brown rope just below my window quivered like a bow-string, and tightened (all the water starting from it in a sparkling shower) till it looked as firm as a bar of iron, and I held on tight, for we were swinging round.  Suddenly the voice of command sang out—­(I fancied with a touch of triumph in the tone)—­“Let go the warp!” The thick rope sprang into the air, and wriggled like a long snake, and it was all I could do to help joining in the shouts that rang from the deck above and from the dock below.  Then the very heart of the ship began to beat with a new sound, and the Scotch lad leaped like a deerhound to the window, and put his arm round my shoulder, and whispered, “That’s the screw, man! we’re off!”