of fear and helplessness. I do not like the picture. It reminds
me too strongly of a rat in a trap. I do not care to think of it;
but it was elective, for the threatened blow did not descend.

Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as
I glared. A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and
showing our teeth. He was a coward, afraid to strike me because I
had not quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to
intimidate me. There was only one galley knife that, as a knife,
amounted to anything. This, through many years of service and
wear, had acquired a long, lean blade. It was unusually cruel-
looking, and at first I had shuddered every time I used it. The
cook borrowed a stone from Johansen and proceeded to sharpen the
knife. He did it with great ostentation, glancing significantly at
me the while. He whetted it up and down all day long. Every odd
moment he could find he had the knife and stone out and was
whetting away. The steel acquired a razor edge. He tried it with
the ball of his thumb or across the nail. He shaved hairs from the
back of his hand, glanced along the edge with microscopic
acuteness, and found, or feigned that he found, always, a slight
inequality in its edge somewhere. Then he would put it on the
stone again and whet, whet, whet, till I could have laughed aloud,
it was so very ludicrous.

It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it,
that under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like
mine, that would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature
protested against doing and was afraid of doing. "Cooky's
sharpening his knife for Hump," was being whispered about among the
sailors, and some of them twitted him about it. This he took in