The £1,000,000 Bank-Note • Paragraph 613
Stage 1 of 6

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The Admiral has breakfasted alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at noon he dines alone in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at six he sups alone in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at 11 P.M. he takes a night relish, alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin. At none of these orgies is there any music; the ship-orchestra is modern. After his final meal he returned thanks for his many blessings, a little over-rating their value, perhaps, and then he laid off his silken splendours or his gilded hardware, and turned in, in his little coffin-bunk, and blew out his flickering stencher, and began to refresh his lungs with inverted sighs freighted with the rich odours of rancid oil and bilgewater. The sighs returned as snores, and then the rats and the cockroaches swarmed out in brigades and divisions and army corps and had a circus all over him.