Every one trod the deck softly, and spoke in a low voice, that he might
not be disturbed; all were anxious to have the morning report of the
surgeon, and our conversation was generally upon the sickly climate, the
yellow fever, of death, and the palisades where they buried us.
Swinburne, the quarter-master, was in my watch, and as he had been long
in the West Indies, I used to obtain all the information from him that I
could. The old fellow had a secret pleasure in frightening me as much
as he could. "Really, Mr Simple, you ax so many questions," he would
say, as I accosted him while he was at his station at the _conn_, "I
wish you wouldn't ax so many questions, and make yourself uncomfortable
--'steady so'--'steady it is;'--with regard to Yellow Jack, as we calls
the yellow fever, it's a devil incarnate, that's sartain--you're well
and able to take your allowance in the morning, and dead as a herring
'fore night. First comes a bit of a head-ache--you goes to the doctor,
who bleeds you like a pig--then you go out of your senses--then up comes
the black vomit, and then it's all over with you, and you go to the land
crabs, who pick your bones as clean and as white as a sea elephant's
tooth. But there be one thing to be said in favour of Yellow Jack, a'ter
all. You dies _straight,_ like a gentleman--not cribbled up like a
snow-fish, chucked out on the ice of the river St Lawrence, with your
knees up to your nose, or your toes stuck into your arm-pits, as does
take place in some of your foreign complaints; but straight, quite
straight, and limber, like a _gentleman_.
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