They were as angry and cross as they were sick.  They wanted nothing in the world so much as the opportunity I had given them to swear at and abuse somebody.  Every one of them raised on his elbow, and shaking his fist at me yelled out: 

“O, you go to ——­, you ——­ ——­ ——.  Just come down another step, and I’ll knock the whole head off ’en you.”

I did not go down any farther.

Coming back on the deck my stomach began to feel qualmish.  Some wretched idiot, whose grandfather’s grave I hope the jackasses have defiled, as the Turks would say, told me that the best preventive of sea-sickness was to drink as much of the milk punch as I could swallow.

Like another idiot, I did so.

I went again to the side of the vessel, but now the fascination of the scene had all faded out.  The restless billows were dreary, savage, hungry and dizzying; they seemed to claw at, and tear, and wrench the struggling ship as a group of huge lions would tease and worry a captive dog.  They distressed her and all on board by dealing a blow which would send her reeling in one direction, but before she had swung the full length that impulse would have sent her, catching her on the opposite side with a stunning shock that sent her another way, only to meet another rude buffet from still another side.

I thought we could all have stood it if the motion had been like that of a swing-backward and forward—­or even if the to and fro motion had been complicated with a side-wise swing, but to be put through every possible bewildering motion in the briefest space of time was more than heads of iron and stomachs of brass could stand.

Mine were not made of such perdurable stuff.

They commenced mutinous demonstrations in regard to the milk punch.

I began wondering whether the milk was not the horrible beer swill, stump-tail kind of which I had heard so much.

And the whisky in it; to use a vigorous Westernism, descriptive of mean whisky, it seemed to me that I could smell the boy’s feet who plowed the corn from which it was distilled.

Then the onions I had eaten in Wilmington began to rebel, and incite the bread, meat and coffee to gastric insurrection, and I became so utterly wretched that life had no farther attractions.

While I was leaning over the bulwark, musing on the complete hollowness of all earthly things, the Captain of the vessel caught hold of me roughly, and said: 

“Look here, you’re just playin’ the very devil a-commandin’ these here men.  Why in ——­ don’t you stiffen up, and hump yourself around, and make these men mind, or else belt them over the head with a capstan bar!  Now I want you to ’tend to your business.  D’you understand me?”

I turned a pair of weary and hopeless eyes upon him, and started to say that a man who would talk to one in my forlorn condition of “stiffening up,” and “belting other fellows over the head with a capstan bar,” would insult a woman dying with consumption, but I suddenly became too full for utterance.