At last, after ringing several bells where there were no lights, in the mere wantonness of good-will, and going away before they could be answered (it would be entertaining to know what dreams they caused the sleepers within), there seemed to be nothing for it but to give up the search till morning, and go to the main street and wait for the last horse-car to the city.

There, seated upon the curbstone, Jonathan Tinker, being plied with a few leading questions, told in hints and scraps the story of his hard life, which was at present that of a second mate, and had been that of a cabin-boy and of a seaman before the mast.  The second mate’s place he held to be the hardest aboard ship.  You got only a few dollars more than the men, and you did not rank with the officers; you took your meals alone, and in everything you belonged by yourself.  The men did not respect you, and sometimes the captain abused you awfully before the passengers.  The hardest captain that Jonathan Tinker ever sailed with was Captain Gooding of the Cape.  It had got to be so that no man could ship second mate under Captain Gooding; and Jonathan Tinker was with him only one voyage.  When he had been home awhile, he saw an advertisement for a second mate, and he went round to the owners’.  They had kept it secret who the captain was; but there was Captain Gooding in the owners’ office.  “Why, here’s the man, now, that I want for a second mate,” said he, when Jonathan Tinker entered; “he knows me.”—­“Captain Gooding, I know you ’most too well to want to sail under you,” answered Jonathan.  “I might go if I hadn’t been with you one voyage too many already.”

“And then the men!” said Jonathan, “the men coming aboard drunk, and having to be pounded sober!  And the hardest of the fight falls on the second mate!  Why, there isn’t an inch of me that hasn’t been cut over or smashed into a jell.  I’ve had three ribs broken; I’ve got a scar from a knife on my cheek; and I’ve been stabbed bad enough, half a dozen times, to lay me up.”

Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the notion of so much misery and such various mutilation were too grotesque not to be amusing.  “Well, what can you do?” he went on.  “If you don’t strike, the men think you’re afraid of them; and so you have to begin hard and go on hard.  I always tell a man, ’Now, my man, I always begin with a man the way I mean to keep on.  You do your duty and you’re all right.  But if you don’t’—­Well, the men ain’t Americans any more,—­Dutch, Spaniards, Chinese, Portuguee, and it ain’t like abusing a white man.”

Jonathan Tinker was plainly part of the horrible tyranny which we all know exists on shipboard; and his listener respected him the more that, though he had heart enough to be ashamed of it, he was too honest not to own it.

Why did he still follow the sea?  Because he did not know what else to do.  When he was younger, he used to love it, but now he hated it.  Yet there was not a prettier life in the world if you got to be captain.  He used to hope for that once, but not now; though he thought he could navigate a ship.  Only let him get his family together again, and he would—­yes, he would—­try to do something ashore.