the funds to aid him in it. He confessed to his dear
friend Rosamund Culling that he thought the parsons happy in having time
to read history. And oh, to feel for certain which side was the wrong
side in our Civil War, so that one should not hesitate in choosing! Such
puzzles are never, he seemed to be aware, solved in a midshipman's mess.
He hated bloodshed, and was guilty of the 'cotton-spinners' babble,'
abhorred of Everard, in alluding to it. Rosamund liked him for his
humanity; but she, too, feared he was a slack Romfrey when she heard him
speak in precocious contempt of glory. Somewhere, somehow, he had got
hold of Manchester sarcasms concerning glory: a weedy word of the
newspapers had been sown in his bosom perhaps. He said: 'I don't care to
win glory; I know all about that; I 've seen an old hat in the Louvre.'
And he would have had her to suppose that he had looked on the
campaigning head-cover of Napoleon simply as a shocking bad, bald,
brown-rubbed old tricorne rather than as the nod of extinction to
thousands, the great orb of darkness, the still-trembling gloomy
quiver--the brain of the lightnings of battles.

Now this boy nursed no secret presumptuous belief that he was fitted for
the walks of the higher intellect; he was not having his impudent boy's
fling at superiority over the superior, as here and there a subtle-minded
vain juvenile will; nor was he a parrot repeating a line from some
Lancastrian pamphlet. He really disliked war and the sword; and scorning
the prospect of an idle life, confessing that his abilities barely
adapted him for a sailor's, he was opposed to the career opened to him
almost to the extreme of shrinking and terror. Or that was the impression
conveyed to a not unsympathetic hearer by his forlorn efforts to make
himself understood, which were like the tappings of the stick of a blind
man mystified by his sense of touch at wrong corners. His bewilderment
and speechlessness were a comic display, tragic to him.

Just as his uncle Everard predicted, he came home from his first voyage a
pleasant sailor lad. His features, more than handsome to a woman, so
mobile they were, shone of sea and spirit, the chance lights of the sea,
and the spirit breathing out of it. As to war and bloodshed, a man's
first thought must be his country, young Jacket remarked, and 'Ich dien'
was the best motto afloat. Rosamund noticed the peculiarity of the books
he selected for his private reading. They were n