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necessary accounts now that he came to deal with them in detail.
    There was already light enough to work at the stern window of the great cabin - a curving series of panes the whole width of the ship that gave him a certain pleasure even at the worst of his unhappiness, as indeed did the cabin itself, a singularly beautiful room with scarcely a right-angle in it -curved deck, curved deck-head, inclined sides - and with its twenty-four feet of breadth and fourteen of length it provided him with more space than all the other officers together; and this was not everything, since out of the great cabin there opened two smaller ones, one for dining, the other for sleeping. The dining cabin, however, had now been made over to Stephen Maturin, and when breakfast arrived, Jack, having dealt with almost a third of the invoices, advice-notes and bills of lading, nodded towards its door and asked 'Is the Doctor stirring?'
    'Never a sound, sir,' said Killick. 'Which he was mortal tired last night, like a foundered horse. But maybe the smell will wake him; it often does.'
    The smell, a combination of coffee, bacon, sausages and toasted soft-tack, had woken him in many latitudes, for like most sailors Jack Aubrey was intensely conservative in the matter of food and even on very long voyages he generally contrived, by carrying hens, pigs, a hardy goat and sacks of green coffee, to have much the same breakfast (apart from the toast) on the equator or beyond the polar circles. It was a meal that Maturin looked upon as England's chief claim to civilization; yet this time even the coffee did not rouse him. Nor did the cleaning of the quarterdeck immediately over his head, nor the piping-up of hammocks at seven bells nor that of all hands to breakfast at eight, with the roaring, rushing and bellowing that this always entailed. He slept on and on, through the gradual dropping of the wind and through the wearing of the ship to the larboard tack, with all the hauling, bracing round and coiling down that accompanied the manoeuvre; and it was not until well on in the forenoon watch that he emerged, gaping and stretching, with his breeches undone at the knee and his wig in his hand.
    'God and Mary with you, gentleman,' said Padeen, who had been waiting for him.
    'God and Mary and Patrick with you, Padeen,' said Stephen.
    'Will I bring a clean shirt and hot water for shaving, now?"
    Stephen considered, rasping his chin. 'You might bring the water,' he said. 'The weather is calm, I find, the motion slight, the danger inconsiderable. As for the shirt,' he went on, raising his voice to overcome the cheerful conversation of a working-party eleven inches above him, 'as for the shirt, I have one on already, and do not mean to take it off. But you may desire Preserved Killick to favour me with a pot of coffee.' The last was said still louder, and in English, since there was a strong likelihood that Killick, always intensely curious, would hear it.
    Some time later, shaved and refreshed, Dr Maturin came on deck: that is to say he walked out of his cabin by the forward door, along the passage to the waist of the ship and so up the ladder to the quarterdeck, upon which the captain, the first mate, the bosun and the gunner were in consultation. Stephen made his way to the taffrail and leaned there in the sun, looking forward the whole length of the ship, some forty yards, to the point where the rising bowsprit carried it farther still; the day had indeed turned out to be pleasant, but the breeze was on the wane and in spite of a noble spread of canvas the Surprise was making no more than two or three knots, with barely a tilt on her deck.
    Everything looked superficially the same - the familiar sun-filled white curve's above, the taut rigging and its severe shadows - and he had to search for some while before he could tell where the essential difference lay. It was not in the lack of naval uniforms, for except in flagships and some others, commanded by very