Presently I slipped noiselessly in through the open door, and found myself in a long, spacious apartment abundantly stored with ponderous hempen cables and hawsers, anchors of various sizes, piles of sails neatly stopped up, quantities of chain of various kinds, coils of rope, sufficient, it appeared to me, to fit a new gang of running rigging to a dozen ships like the _Barracouta_, bundles of blocks, single, double, threefold, and sister, dangling from the beams--in fact almost every conceivable article that could possibly be needed in the fitting out of a ship.
