I am compelled to mister him and to sir him with every speech. One reason for this is that Wolf Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him. It is an unprecedented thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the cook, but this is certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing. Two or three times he put his head into the galley and chaffed Mugridge good-naturedly, and once, this afternoon, he stood by the break of the poop and chatted with him for fully fifteen minutes. When it was over, and Mugridge was back in the galley, he became greasily radiant and went about his work humming Coster songs in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto.
? ? ? ? 'I always get along with the officers,' he remarked to me in a confidential tone. 'I know the w'y, I do, to myke myself uppreci-yted. There was my last skipper- w'y, I thought nothin' of droppin' down in the cabin for a little chat an' a friendly glass. "Mugridge," says 'e to me, "Mugridge," says 'e, "you've missed yer vocytion." "an' ow's that?" says I. "Yer should' a' been born a gentleman, an' never 'ad to work for yer livin'.
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