open, my nose cut, and my chin bleeding. I had lost my cap, one of my
slippers, and my shirt was torn to rags. Of all this I was not aware. I
was amazed to see the ship still afloat, the poop-deck whole--and, most
of all, to see anybody alive. Also the peace of the sky and the serenity
of the sea were distinctly surprising. I suppose I expected to see them
convulsed with horror . . . . Pass the bottle.

"There was a voice hailing the ship from somewhere--in the air, in the
sky--I couldn't tell. Presently I saw the captain--and he was mad. He
asked me eagerly, 'Where's the cabin-table?' and to hear such a question
was a frightful shock. I had just been blown up, you understand, and
vibrated with that experience,--I wasn't quite sure whether I was alive.
Mahon began to stamp with both feet and yelled at him, 'Good God! don't
you see the deck's blown out of her?' I found my voice, and stammered
out as if conscious of some gross neglect of duty, 'I don't know where
the cabin-table is.' It was like an absurd dream.

"Do you know what he wanted next? Well, he wanted to trim the yards.
Very placidly, and as if lost in thought, he insisted on having the
foreyard squared. 'I don't know if there's anybody alive,' said Mahon,
almost tearfully. 'Surely,' he said gently, 'there will be enough left
to square the foreyard.'

"The old chap, it seems, was in his own berth, winding up the
chronometers, when the shock sent him spinning. Immediately it occurred
to him--as he said afterwards--that the ship had struck something, and
he ran out into the cabin. There, he saw, the cabin-table had vanished
somewhere. The deck being blown up, it had fallen down into the
lazarette of course. Where we had our breakfast that morning he saw only
a great hole in the floor. This appeared to him so awfully mysterious,