I felt great sympathy with Pat’s evident disrelish for this tale, but the oldest and hairiest sailor seemed hardly to regard it as worth calling an adventure.  If you wanted to see ice that was ice, you should try the coast of Greenland, he said.  “Hartic Hexploration for choice, but seals or blubber took you pretty far up.  He remembered the Christmas he lost them two.” (And cocking one leg over the other, he drew a worsted sock from his foot, and displayed the fact that his great toe and the one next to it were gone.) “They lost more than toes that time too.  You might believe it gave you a lonelyish kind of feel when there was no more to be done for the ship but get as much firewood out of her timber as you could, and all you had in the way of a home was huts on an ice-floe, and a white fox, with a black tip to its tail, for a pet.  It wouldn’t have lasted long, except for discipline,” we young ’uns might take notice.  “Pleasure’s all very well ashore, where a man may go his own way a long time, and show his nasty temper at home, and there’s other folks about him doing double duty to make up for it and keep things together; but when you come to a handful of men cast adrift to make a world for themselves, as one may say, Lord bless you! there’s nothing’s any good then but making every man do as he’s bid and be content with what he gets—­and clearing him out if he won’t.  It was a hard winter at that.  But regularity pulled us through.  Reg’lar work, reg’lar ways, reg’lar rations and reg’lar lime-juice, as long as it lasted.  And not half a bad Christmas we didn’t have neither, and poor Sal’s Christmas-tree was the best part of it.  ’What sort of a Christmas-tree, and why Sal’s?’ Well, the carpenter put it up, and an uncommon neat thing he made too, of pinewood and birch-broom, and some of the men hung it over with paper chains.  And then the carpenter opened the bundle Sal made him take his oath he wouldn’t open till Christmas, whatever came, and I’m blest if there wasn’t a pair of brand-new socks for every soul of the ship’s crew.  Not that we were so badly off for socks, but washing ’em reg’lar, and never being able to get ’em really dry, and putting ’em on again like stones, was a mighty different thing to getting all our feet into something dry and warm.  ‘Who was Sal?’ Well, poor Sal was a rum ’un, but she’s dead.  It’s a queer thing, we only lost one hand, and that was the carpenter, and he died the same day poor Sal was murdered down Bermondsey way.  It’s a queer world, this, no matter where you’re cruising!  But there’s one thing you’ll learn if you live as long as me; a woman’s heart and the ocean deep’s much about the same.  You can’t reckon on ’em, and GOD A’mighty, as made ’em, alone knows the depths of ’em; but as our doctor used to say (and he was always fetching things out and putting ’em into bottles), it’s the rough weather brings the best of it up.”