CHAPTER XIII.
A VERY HOT PRESS.
The performance of _Love Between Decks_ had reached its famous fourth act, in which Tom Taffrail, to protect his sweetheart (who has followed him to sea in man's attire), strikes the infamous First Lieutenant and is marched off between two marines for punishment.
This scene, as everyone knows, is laid on the upper deck of his Majesty's ship _Poseidon_ (of seventy-four guns), and the management, as a condition of engaging Mr.Orlando B.Sturge (who was exacting in details), had mounted it, at great expense, with a couple of lifelike guns, R.and L., and for background the overhang of the quarter-deck, with rails and a mizzen-mast of real timber against a painted cloth representing the rise of the poop.
At the moment when our Major entered the gallery, the heated atmosphere of which well nigh robbed him of breath, Tom Taffrail had taken up his position on the prompt side, close down by the footlights, and thrown himself into attitude to deliver the speech of manly defiance which provokes the Wicked Lieutenant to descend into the waist of the ship and receive the well-merited weight of the hero's fist.

The hero, with one foot planted on a coil of real rope and one arm supporting the half-inanimate form of his Susan, in deference to stage convention faced the audience, while with his other arm uplifted he invoked vengeance upon the oppressor, who scowled down from the quarterdeck rail.
"Hear me, kyind Heaven!" declaimed Tom Taffrail, "for Heaven at least is my witness, that beneath the tar-stained shirt of a British sailor there may beat the heart of a _Man_!"-- As a matter of fact, Mr.Sturge was clothed in a clean blue and white striped shirt, with socks to match, white duck trousers no less immaculate, with a huge glittering brass buckle on the front of his belt, two buckles of smaller size but similar pattern on his polished dancing shoes, and wore his hair in a natty pigtail tied with cherry-coloured ribbon.
-- "Hear and judge betwixt me and yonder tyrant! Let the storm off Pernambuco declare who first sprang to the foretop and thence aloft to strike t'gallant yards while the good ship _Poseidon_ careened before its hurricane rage! Ay, and when the main topm'st went smack-smooth by the board, who was it slid like lightning to the deck and, with hands yet glowing from the halliards, plucked forth axe and hewed the wreckage clear?
But a truce to these reminders! 'Twas my duty, and, as a seaman, I did it!" Here, having laid his tender burden so that her back rested against the coil of real rope, Mr.Sturge executed the opening steps of a hornpipe, and advancing to the footlights, stood swaying with crossed arms while the orchestra performed the prelude to his most celebrated song.
At this point Mr.Jope, who for some seconds had been breathing hard at the back of the Major's neck, clutched his comrade by the arm.
"You 'eard that, Bill ?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.
"Ay," answered Bill Adams.

"He slipped down from the t'gallant yards by the halliards." "Would ye mind pinchin' me ?" "Where ?" "Anywhere; in the fleshy part of the ham for choice; not too vigorous, but just to make sure.

He come down by the halliards.
_Which_ halliards ?" "Signal halliards, belike.

Damme, why not?
Aboard a vessel with the decks laid ath'artships--" "An' the maintopm'st went smack-smooth--you _'eard_ him?
What sort o' spar--" "Dunno"-- Bill paused and audibly shifted his quid--"unless 'twas a parsnip.