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I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them.
For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.
It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.
And as for going as cook,though I confess there is considerable glory in that,
a cook being a sort of officer on ship-boardyet, somehow,
I never fancied broiling fowls;though once broiled, judiciously buttered,
and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully,
not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.
It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse,
that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some,
and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough.
It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,
the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot,
you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you.
The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor,
and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.
But even this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks?
What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?
Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me,
because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance?
Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me abouthowever they may thump and punch me about,
I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;
that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same wayeither in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is;
and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble,
whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of.
On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay.
And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us.
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