e confidence in me?"

"Because," knowingly smiled the good merchant, "if you were other than I
have confidence that you are, hardly would you challenge distrust that
way."

"But you have not examined my book."

"What need to, if already I believe that it is what it is lettered to
be?"

"But you had better. It might suggest doubts."

"Doubts, may be, it might suggest, but not knowledge; for how, by
examining the book, should I think I knew any more than I now think I
do; since, if it be the true book, I think it so already; and since if
it be otherwise, then I have never seen the true one, and don't know
what that ought to look like."

"Your logic I will not criticize, but your confidence I admire, and
earnestly, too, jocose as was the method I took to draw it out. Enough,
we will go to yonder table, and if there be any business which, either
in my private or official capacity, I can help you do, pray command
me."

CHAPTER XI.

ONLY A PAGE OR SO.

The transaction concluded, the two still remained seated, falling into
familiar conversation, by degrees verging into that confidential sort of
sympathetic silence, the last refinement and luxury of unaffected good
feeling. A kind of social superstition, to suppose that to be truly
friendly one must be saying friendly words all the time, any more than
be doing friendly deeds continually. True friendliness, like true
religion, being in a sort independent of works.

At length, the good merchant, whose eyes were pensively resting upon the
gay tables in the distance, broke the spell by saying that, from the
spectacle before them, one would little divine what other quarters of
the boat might reveal. He cited the case, accidentally encountered but
an hour or two previous, of a shrunken old miser, clad in shrunken old
moleskin, stretched out, an invalid, on a bare plank in the emigrants'
quarters, eagerly clinging to life and lucre, though the one was gasping
for outlet, and about the other he was in torment lest death, or some
other unprincipled cut-purse, should be the means of his losing it; by
like feeble tenure holding lungs and pouch, and yet knowing and
desiring nothing beyond them; for his mind, never raised above mould,
was now all but mouldered away. To such a degree, indeed, that he had no
trust in anything, not even in his parchment bonds, which, the better to
preserve from the tooth of time, he had packed down and sealed up, like
brandy peaches, in a