"I must be dreaming," mused the doctor; "even the ceiling seems alive."

He prodded it again-regarding it closely this time. The ceiling at once
rose to greater altitudes, and at the same moment an old face with bushy
whiskers crawled under the edge of it, and asked him profanely what he
meant by it. It also asked him whether he wanted something for himself,
because, if so, he was going the right way to work.

"Where am I?" demanded the bewildered doctor. "Mary! Mary!"

He started up in bed, and brought his head in sudden violent contact with
the ceiling. Then, before the indignant ceiling could carry out its
threat of a moment before, he slipped out of bed and stood on a floor
which was in its place one moment and somewhere else the next.

In the smell of bilge-water, tar, and the foetid atmosphere generally his
clouded brain awoke to the fact that he was on board ship, but resolutely
declined to inform him how he got there. He looked down in disgust at
the ragged clothes which he had on in lieu of the usual pajamas; and
then, as events slowly pieced themselves together in his mind,
remembered, as the last thing that he could remember, that he had warned
his friend Harry Thomson, solicitor, that if he had any more to drink it
would not be good for him.

He wondered dimly as he stood whether Thomson was there too, and walking
unsteadily round the forecastle, roused the sleepers, one by one, and
asked them whether they were Harry Thomson, all answering with much
fluency in the negative, until he came to one man who for some time made
no answer at all.