stared at me in silence, agape with perplexity.

"Well, I'll be jiggered!" he exclaimed at last, thumping the hencoop
with his fist in his bewilderment; "what's a man to do? Here's that
chap Wilde--a man of eddication, mind ye, Mr Troubridge--comes along
and spins us a yarn of how we poor sailormen are ill-treated and kep'
down, overworked and underpaid by rich owners; and of how the law won't
do nothin' for us; and he shows us a plan how we can live in peace and
happiness and enj'yment all the rest of our lives; and then you turns up
and knocks the whole bag o' tricks into a cocked hat! Which of ye is
right? If you're right, I stays as I am all my life, a poor, miserable
shellback, endin' my days by sellin' matches in the streets, when I'm
too old and too stiff wi' the rheumatics to go to sea any longer. That
bein' the case, I'll give Mr Wilde's plan a trial for a spell; right or
wrong."

"Very well," said I, "go your own way, if you will; but you will most
certainly regret it some day when it is too late to retrace your steps.
And let me tell you this, Polson, you are attributing your position and
its accompanying hardships to the wrong cause altogether. The true
state of the case is that you are an ignorant and unintelligent man
through lack of education. Did you ever go to school?"

"No, never, Mr Troubridge," answered my companion. "What little I
knows I larned myself. My father, who was supposed to be a wharfinger,
was too fond of the drink ever to be able to hold a job, the consekence
bein' that my poor mother had to keep things goin' by takin' in washin';
and, since there was seven of us young 'uns, it took her all her time to
find us in grub and clo'es. She hadn't no money to spare for
eddication. Consekence was I didn't have none. And when I was 'bout
'leven year old things got to such a pitch at home that I cut and run,
goin' to sea as cabin-boy in a Geordie to start with, and gradually
workin' my way up to bein' a bosun, as I am now."

"Ah!" said I. "Well, you have done a good deal better, Polson, than
many others in like circumstances. But--and this is my point--if your
father, instead of stupefying his brains with drink, had been a sober,
steady, hard-working man, and had done his duty by you to the extent of
sending you to school, you would have gained a vast amount of valuable
knowledge. You would have cultivated your intellect; you would have
learned to discriminate between right and w