Want to hear 'em ?" I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered that I'd like to very much.
"Here, you bosun!" Mr.Pike snarled.

"Wake up! Start a song! Topsail halyards!" In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite bleakness freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin.
Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could have issued so sepulchral a plaint.

It was unmusical, unbeautiful, unlively, and indescribably doleful.

Yet the words showed that it should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for the words poor Nancy sang were: "Away, way, way, yar, We'll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots." "Quit it! Quit it!" Mr.Pike roared.

"This ain't a funeral! Ain't there one of you that can sing?
Come on, now! It's a topsail-yard--" He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out of the men's hands to put into them the right rope.
"Come on, bosun! Break her out!" Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers' voice, cracked and crazy and even more lugubrious than Nancy's: "Then up aloft that yard must go, Whiskey for my Johnny." The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two men feebly mumbled it.