This, however, sprang up later on.  Meantime in common with the rest of the shipping in that Eastern port, I was left in no doubt as to Hermann’s notions of hygienic clothing.  Evidently he believed in wearing good stout flannel next his skin.  On most days little frocks and pinafores could be seen drying in the mizzen rigging of his ship, or a tiny row of socks fluttering on the signal halyards; but once a fortnight the family washing was exhibited in force.  It covered the poop entirely.  The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity.  Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments that, taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies.  On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen mast.

She had her berth just ahead of me, and her name was Diana,—­Diana not of Ephesus but of Bremen.  This was proclaimed in white letters a foot long spaced widely across the stern (somewhat like the lettering of a shop-sign) under the cottage windows.  This ridiculously unsuitable name struck one as an impertinence towards the memory of the most charming of goddesses; for, apart from the fact that the old craft was physically incapable of engaging in any sort of chase, there was a gang of four children belonging to her.  They peeped over the rail at passing boats and occasionally dropped various objects into them.  Thus, sometime before I knew Hermann to speak to, I received on my hat a horrid rag-doll belonging to Hermann’s eldest daughter.  However, these youngsters were upon the whole well behaved.  They had fair heads, round eyes, round little knobby noses, and they resembled their father a good deal.

This Diana of Bremen was a most innocent old ship, and seemed to know nothing of the wicked sea, as there are on shore households that know nothing of the corrupt world.  And the sentiments she suggested were unexceptionable and mainly of a domestic order.  She was a home.  All these dear children had learned to walk on her roomy quarter-deck.  In such thoughts there is something pretty, even touching.  Their teeth, I should judge, they had cut on the ends of her running gear.  I have many times observed the baby Hermann (Nicholas) engaged in gnawing the whipping of the fore-royal brace.  Nicholas’ favourite place of residence was under the main fife-rail.  Directly he was let loose he would crawl off there, and the first seaman who came along would bring him, carefully held aloft in tarry hands, back to the cabin door.  I fancy there must have been a standing order to that effect.  In the course of these transportations the baby, who was the only peppery person in the ship, tried to smite these stalwart young German sailors on the face.