“’Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let’s have a taste.  By the Lord, it’s worth bottling!  I tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home.  The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of ’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose.  If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him to jump overboard and scatter ’em.  They’re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him.  But he’s a simple old soul,—­Rad, and a beauty too.  Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses.  I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.’

“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney, pretending not to have heard the sailors’ talk.  ‘Thunder away at it!’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket.  ‘Lively, boys, lively, now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s utmost energies.

“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow.  Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened.  Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large.

“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time.  Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces.  But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard.  Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades.  I mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.