To this end, Rose-water, Sunshine, and May-day every morning sprang into their respective apartments, stripped to the waist, and well provided with bits of soap-stone and sand.

By exercising these in a very vigorous manner, they threw themselves into a violent perspiration, and put a fine polish upon the interior of the coppers.
Sunshine was the bard of the trio; and while all three would be busily employed clattering their soap-stones against the metal, he would exhilarate them with some remarkable St.Domingo melodies; one of which was the following: "Oh! I los' my shoe in an old canoe, Johnio! come Winum so! Oh! I los' my boot in a pilot-boat, Johnio! come Winum so! Den rub-a-dub de copper, oh! Oh! copper rub-a-dub-a-oh!" When I listened to these jolly Africans, thus making gleeful their toil by their cheering songs, I could not help murmuring against that immemorial rule of men-of-war, which forbids the sailors to sing out, as in merchant-vessels, when pulling ropes, or occupied at any other ship's duty.

Your only music, at such times, is the shrill pipe of the boatswain's mate, which is almost worse than no music at all.

And if the boatswain's mate is not by, you must pull the ropes, like convicts, in profound silence; or else endeavour to impart unity to the exertions of all hands, by singing out mechanically, _one_, _two_, _three_, and then pulling all together.
Now, when Sunshine, Rose-water, and May-day have so polished the ship's coppers, that a white kid glove might be drawn along the inside and show no stain, they leap out of their holes, and the water is poured in for the coffee.

And the coffee being boiled, and decanted off in bucketfuls, the cooks of the messes march up with their salt beef for dinner, strung upon strings and tallied with labels; all of which are plunged together into the self-same coppers, and there boiled.