A CATASTROPHE* 209
their number in the death-agony. The fated one was always carried
out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher was always
hidden from sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter: everybody
knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its muffled step and
* its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it wistfully, and a
shudder went abreast of it like a wave.
I saw many poor fellows removed to the ' death-room,' and saw
them no more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither
more than once. TTia hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He
was clothed in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled
nothing human. He was often out of his mind; and then his pains
would make him rave and shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after
a period of dumb exhaustion, his disordered imagination would
suddenly transform the great apartment into a forecastle, and the
hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and he would come to a
bitting posture and shout, * Hump yourselves, hump yourselves, you
petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be all day getting
that hatful of freight out ? * and supplement this explosion with a
firmament-obliterating irruption of profanity which nothing could
stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then while
these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the cotton
and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was bad
for the others, of course—this noise and these exhibitions; so the
doctors tried to give him. morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind
or out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed
by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it.
He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary
medicines and in his water—so he ceased from putting either to his
lips. Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering
days, he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid
fluid, and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his
strength ; but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that
he allowed no more to be brought near him. Three times I saw him
carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying ; but
each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be
taken back. He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.
But he was the only one who went to the death-room and