Seafaring people talk like this, because they are silly, and do not know
any better. It is no use being angry with them.
I got a little sleep at last. Not in the bunk I had been at such pains
to secure: I would not have stopped down in that stuffy saloon, if
anybody had offered me a hundred pounds for doing so. Not that anybody
did; nor that anybody seemed to want me there at all. I gathered this
from the fact that the first thing that met my eye, after I had succeeded
in clawing my way down, was a boot. The air was full of boots. There
were sixty men sleeping there--or, as regards the majority, I should say
_trying_ to sleep there--some in bunks, some on tables, and some under
tables. One man _was_ asleep, and was snoring like a hippopotamus--like
a hippopotamus that had caught a cold, and was hoarse; and the other
fifty-nine were sitting up, throwing their boots at him. It was a snore,
very difficult to locate. From which particular berth, in that
dimly-lighted, evil-smelling place, it proceeded nobody was quite sure.
At one moment, it appeared to come, wailing and sobbing, from the
larboard, and the next instant it thundered forth, seemingly from the
starboard. So every man who could reach a boot picked it up, and threw
it promiscuously, silently praying to Providence, as he did so, to guide
it aright and bring it safe to its desired haven.
I watched the weird scene for a minute or two, and then I hauled myself
on deck again, and sat down--and went to sleep on a coil of rope; and was
awakened, in the course of time, by a sailor who wanted that coil of rope
to throw at the head of a man who was standing, doing no harm to anybody,
on the quay at Ostend.