gazed about him with admirable naïveté. Among the piles of freight
were some agricultural machines. "Ha," cried the managing director,
"this, evidently, is where the Piers Plowman works!" The club's
private yacht, white and lovely, lay at her berth, and in the
Doctor's cabin the members proceeded to the serious discussion of
literature. Lawton, however, seemed nervous. Cargo was being put
aboard the ship, and ever and anon there rose a loud rumbling of
donkey engines. The occasional hurrying roar of machinery seemed to
make Lawton nervous, for he said apprehensively that he feared
someone was rushing the growler. In the corridor outside the
Doctor's quarters a group of stewardesses were violently
altercating, and Lawton remarked that a wench can make almost as
much noise as a winch. On the whole, however, he admired the ship
greatly, and was taken with the club's plans for going cruising. He
said he felt safer after noting that the lifeboats were guaranteed
to hold forty persons with cubic feet.

By this time, all sense of verbal restraint had been lost, and the
club (if we must be candid) concluded its session by chanting, not
without enjoyment, its own sea chantey, which runs as follows:--

I shipped aboard a galleass
In a brig whereof men brag,
But lying on my palliass
My spirits began to sag.

I heard the starboard steward
Singing abaft the poop;
He lewdly sang to looard
And sleep fled from the sloop.