These things were regarded by
Fritz and Jack with great interest; and nowhere is the genius of man
so brilliantly displayed as on board a well-appointed ship of war.
The young men, however, when they sat down to dinner in the captain's
cabin, and beheld a long table flanked with cushioned seats, commanded
at each end by arm-chairs, the side-board plentifully garnished with
plate and crystal of various kinds, fastened with copper nails to
prevent damage from the ship's pitching, they did not reflect that
they were in the crater of a volcano, and that two paces from where
they sat there was powder enough to blow the ship and all its crew up
into the air.
They were likewise highly amused by the perpetual "guessing,"
"calculating," "reckoning," and inexhaustible curiosity of the crew;
but their admiration of the ship, her guns, her stores, and her
tackle, were boundless; they felt that their pinnace was a mere toy in
comparison. The urbanity of the officers also was a source of much
gratification to them; Jack even declared that all the civilization of
Europe had been shipped on board the _Hoboken_, and in so far as that
was concerned, they had no occasion to go on much further.
The object of this expedition, however, was a surgeon. There was one
on board. Would he go to New Switzerland? Jack determined to try, and
accordingly he walked straight off to the personage in question.
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