Sam in the Suburbs

He yawned spaciously. Hash Todhunter was a lean, stringy man in the early thirties, with a high forehead and a ruminative eye. Irritated messmates who had played poker with him had sometimes compared this eye to that of a perishing fish; but to the critic whose judgment was not biased and inflamed by recent pecuniary losses it would have been more suggestive of a parrot which has looked on life and found it full of disillusionment.

There was a strong pessimistic streak in Hash, and in his cups he was accustomed to hint darkly that if everyone had their rights he would have been in the direct line of succession to an earldom. It was a long and involved story, casting great discredit on all the parties concerned; but as he never told it twice in the same way, little credence was accorded to it by a discriminating fo’c’sle. For the rest, he cooked the best dry hash on the Western Ocean, but was not proud.