He had very scanty whiskers, too, and this seemed to make his face look thinner and his nose longer, so that the latter resembled a bird's beak.
This was Captain Gillespie, as I quickly learnt from the way Mr Saunders and Matthews addressed him; Mr Mackay, meanwhile, giving him a cordial salutation from the head of the poop, his proper place as the officer in command, until his superior took the reins in his own hand, which as yet the captain did not offer to do.
"I hardly expected you so soon, sir," said Mr Mackay, leaning over the rail.

"We brought up earlier than I thought we should, the tide fetching us down in capital time." "Aye, but I was on the look-out for ye, Mackay, for I told you I'd be aboard almost as you anchored; and, you know, when I say a thing I mean a thing." "Hear that now ?" said Tim the boatswain to me in a loud whisper, he having come down from the forecastle after heaving a rope over to those in the boat, and I following him to where the others were standing on the deck.

"Ye'll soon know owld Jock's ways.

We allers calls him `Sayin's an' Maynins'; for that's what he's allars a-sayin'!" While the captain was exchanging greetings with the mates and Matthews, my other two fellow apprentices being nowhere to be seen, another thin man followed him up the side-ladder from the boat, who, wearing a thick monkey-jacket, looked a trifle less lean than Captain Gillespie; and to him succeeded a shoal of sailors, nineteen clambering in on board after him.
Tim Rooney did not notice these much, only telling me that the one who came immediately in the captain's wake was the "say," or channel pilot, who would con the ship for the remainder of her course down the river and to the Downs beyond; and I may add that this individual was the only thin pilot I have ever seen! Rooney also said that the batch of men brought to complete our crew seemed "a tidy lot;" but when the last man stepped down from the bulwarks, he seemed a little more impressed, not to say excited.
"Bedad," he exclaimed sotto voce to me, "I'm blissid if the skipper ar'n't picked up that Chinee cook we'd aboard two v'y'ges agone, owld Ching Wang! There's his ugly yalle'r face now toorned this way foreninst you, Misther Gray-ham.

Begorra hee don't look a day oulder, if a troifle uglier since I sayed him last!" "And is he a Chinaman ?" I asked, full of curiosity; "a real, live Chinaman from the East ?" "Be jabers he is, ivery inch av him from his blissid ould pigtail, tied up with a siezin' of ropeyarn, down to his rum wooden brogues an' all, the craythur!" replied Tim, stretching out his big hairy fist to the other, who had advanced on seeing him and stopped just abreast, his saffron-coloured face puckered up into a sort of wrinkled smile of pleasure at meeting an old shipmate like the boatswain, who said in his hearty way: "Hallo, ye ould son av a gun! Who'd a-thought av sayin' ye ag'in in the ould barquey, Ching Wang?
Glad ye're a-comin' with us, an' hopes ye're all roight!" "Chin-chin, Mass' Looney," answered the Chinee, putting his monkey-like paw into Tim's broad palm and shaking hands cordially in English fashion.