The moon was beginning to walk on the still sea before the elder men came aft.  The cook had no need to cry “second half.”  Dan and Manuel were down the hatch and at table ere Tom Platt, last and most deliberate of the elders, had finished wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.  Harvey followed Penn, and sat down before a tin pan of cod’s tongues and sounds, mixed with scraps of pork and fried potato, a loaf of hot bread, and some black and powerful coffee.  Hungry as they were, they waited while “Pennsylvania” solemnly asked a blessing.  Then they stoked in silence till Dan drew a breath over his tin cup and demanded of Harvey how he felt.

“’Most full, but there’s just room for another piece.”

The cook was a huge, jet-black negro, and, unlike all the negroes Harvey had met, did not talk, contenting himself with smiles and dumb-show invitations to eat more.

“See, Harvey,” said Dan, rapping with his fork on the table, “it’s jest as I said.  The young an’ handsome men—­like me an’ Pennsy an’ you an’ Manuel—­we’re second ha’af, an’ we eats when the first ha’af are through.  They’re the old fish; an’ they’re mean an’ humpy, an’ their stummicks has to be humoured; so they come first, which they don’t deserve.  Aeneid that so, doctor?”

The cook nodded.

“Can’t he talk?” said Harvey in a whisper.

“‘Nough to get along.  Not much o’ anything we know.  His natural tongue’s kinder curious.  Comes from the innards of Cape Breton, he does, where the farmers speak homemade Scotch.  Cape Breton’s full o’ niggers whose folk run in there durin’ aour war, an’ they talk like farmers—­all huffy-chuffy.”

“That is not Scotch,” said “Pennsylvania.”  “That is Gaelic.  So I read in a book.”

“Penn reads a heap.  Most of what he says is so—­’cep’ when it comes to a caount o’ fish—­eh?”

“Does your father just let them say how many they’ve caught without checking them?” said Harvey.

“Why, yes.  Where’s the sense of a man lyin’ fer a few old cod?”

“Was a man once lied for his catch,” Manuel put in.  “Lied every day.  Fife, ten, twenty-fife more fish than come he say there was.”

“Where was that?” said Dan.  “None o’ aour folk.”

“Frenchman of Anguille.”

“Ah!  Them West Shore Frenchmen don’t caount anyway.  Stands to reason they can’t caount Ef you run acrost any of their soft hooks, Harvey, you’ll know why,” said Dan, with an awful contempt.

    “Always more and never less,
     Every time we come to dress,”

Long Jack roared down the hatch, and the “second ha’af” scrambled up at once.

The shadow of the masts and rigging, with the never-furled riding-sail, rolled to and fro on the heaving deck in the moonlight; and the pile of fish by the stern shone like a dump of fluid silver.  In the hold there were tramplings and rumblings where Disko Troop and Tom Platt moved among the salt-bins.  Dan passed Harvey a pitchfork, and led him to the inboard end of the rough table, where Uncle Salters was drumming impatiently with a knife-haft.  A tub of salt water lay at his feet.