And this drew
from the boatswain the sad fate of a comrade of his, who had sailed
twice round the world, been ship-wrecked four times, in three
collisions, and twice aboard ships that took fire, had Yellow Jack in
the West Indies, and sunstroke at the Cape, lost a middle finger from
frost-bite in the north of China, and one eye in a bit of a row at San
Francisco, and came safe home after it all, and married a snug widow in
a pork-shop at Wapping Old Stairs, and got out of his course steering
home through a London fog on Guy Fawkes Day, and walked straight into
the river, and was found at low tide next morning with a quid of tobacco
in his cheek, and nothing missing about him but his glass eye, which
shows, as the boatswain said, that "Fogs is fogs anywhere, and a nasty
thing too."
It was towards dark, when we had been fourteen days at sea, that our own
fog suddenly lifted, and the good news flew from mouth to mouth that we
might be "in about midnight." But the fog came down again, and I do not
think that the whole fourteen days put together felt so long as the
hours of that one night through which the fog-horn blew, and we longed
for day.
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