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There were no doors in the cabin; at least such doors as we have in our houses. A small ladder on one side of the room led up to a trap-door in the roof (the “deck,” Uncle Dick always called it), and that was the only way one could go in and out of the cabin. There was one door that opened into Uncle Dick’s state-room, but that was not hung on hinges; it worked on a slide.

The old sailor turned up his nose at a bedstead, and always slept in a bunk. His looking-glass was fastened to the wall; his wash-stand was held firmly in its place by screws; his centre-table, on which was always to be found Bowditch’s Navigator, a chart or two, and a telescope, was also screwed fast to the floor, and provided with a raised edge to keep the articles from falling off when the old mansion was rocking and tumbling about in a gale. Walter and Eugene always laughed when they saw this contrivance. The idea that a solid stone house, that had withstood the storms of a quarter of a century, could so far forget itself as to rock about in the wind sufficiently to displace any of Uncle Dick’s furniture, was highly amusing to them. But it was no laughing matter with the old sailor. He was in earnest about it; and if he had been on the point of starting with the mansion on a voyage across the Atlantic, he could not have taken more pains to get everything in his cabin in readiness for the storms he would be likely to meet on the way.