We were loading for the East Shore trade, as I said, didn’t I?  There isn’t much of the genuine, old-fashioned trade left in these days, except the whiskey branch, which will be brisk, I take it, till the Malagasy carry the prohibitory law by a large majority in both houses.  We had a little whiskey in the hold, I remember, that trip, with a good stock of knives, red flannel, handsaws, nails, and cotton.  We were hoping to be at home again within the year.  We were well provisioned, and Dodd,—­he was the cook,—­Dodd made about as fair coffee as you’re likely to find in the galley of a trader.  As for our officers, when I say the less said of them the better, it ain’t so much that I mean to be disrespectful as that I mean to put it tenderly.  Officers in the merchant service, especially if it happens to be the African service, are brutal men quite as often as they ain’t (at least, that’s my experience; and when some of your great ship-owners argue the case with me,—­as I’m free to say they have done before now,—­I say, “That’s my experience, sir,” which is all I’ve got to say);—­brutal men, and about as fit for their positions as if they’d been imported for the purpose a little indirect from Davy Jones’s Locker.  Though they do say that the flogging is pretty much done away with in these days, which makes a difference.

Sometimes on a sunshiny afternoon, when the muddy water showed a little muddier than usual, on account of the clouds being the color of silver, and all the air the color of gold, when the oily barrels were knocking about on the wharves, and the smells were strong from the fish-houses, and the men shouted and the mates swore, and our baby ran about deck a-play with everybody (he was a cunning little chap with red stockings and bare knees, and the lads took quite a shine to him), “Jake,” his mother would say, with a little sigh,—­low, so that the captain never heard,—­“think if it was him gone away for a year in company the like of that!”

Then she would drop her shining needles, and call the little fellow back sharp, and catch him up into her arms.

Go into the keeping-room there, Tom, and ask her all about it.  Bless you! she remembers those days at dock better than I do.  She could tell you to this hour the color of my shirt, and how long my hair was, and what I ate, and how I looked, and what I said.  I didn’t generally swear so thick when she was about.

Well; we weighed, along the last of the month, in pretty good spirits.  The Madonna was as stanch and seaworthy as any eight-hundred-tonner in the harbor, if she was clumsy; we turned in, some sixteen of us or thereabouts, into the fo’castle,—­a jolly set, mostly old messmates, and well content with one another; and the breeze was stiff from the west, with a fair sky.

The night before we were off, Molly and I took a walk upon the wharves after supper.  I carried the baby.  A boy, sitting on some boxes, pulled my sleeve as we went by, and asked me, pointing to the Madonna, if I would tell him the name of the ship.