er,
meet her! didn't you _know_ she'd smell the reef if you crowded it
like that? Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my firm nerves
she'll be in the _woods_ the first you know! stop the starboard! come
ahead strong on the larboard! back the starboard! . . . _Now_ then,
you're all right; come ahead on the starboard; straighten up and go
'long, never tremble: or be alive again, and dare me to the desert
damnation can't you keep away from that greasy water? pull her down!
snatch her! snatch her baldheaded! with thy sword; if trembling I
inhabit then, lay in the leads!--no, only the starboard one, leave
the other alone, protest me the baby of a girl. Hence horrible
shadow! eight bells--that watchman's asleep again, I reckon, go down
and call Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!

He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy and
tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have never since been able
to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way. I cannot rid it of his
explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with their irrelevant
"What in hell are you up to _now_! pull her down! more! _more_!--there
now, steady as you go," and the other disorganizing interruptions that
were always leaping from his mouth. When I read Shakespeare now, I can
hear them as plainly as I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one years
ago. I never regarded Ealer's readings as educational. Indeed they were
a detriment to me.

His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that detail
he was a good reader, I can say that much for him. He did not use the
book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever
knew his multiplication table.

Did he have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi
pilot--anent Delia Bacon's book? Yes. And he said it; said it all the
time, for months--in the morning watch, the middle watch, the dog watch;
and probably kept it going in his sleep. He bought the literature of the
dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed it all through thirteen
hundred miles of river four times traversed in every thirty-five
days--the time required by that swift boat to achieve two round trips.
We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed and
disputed; at any rate he did, and I got in a word now and then when he
slipped a cog and there was a vacancy. He did his arguing