ding
reveries that so often obscured his playful and vivacious mien, as a
shadow darkens the golden tints of the field of ripe and waving corn.

While most of those who were not actors in the noisy and humorous
achievements of the crew steadily regarded the same, some with wonder,
others with distrust, and all with more or less of the humour of the hour,
the Rover, to all appearance, was quite unconscious of all that was going
on before his face. It is true, that at times he raised his eyes to the
active beings who clung like squirrels to the ropes, or suffered them to
fall on the duller movements of the men below; but it was always with a
vacancy which proved that the image they carried to the brain was dim and
illusory. The looks he cast, from time to time, on Mrs Wyllys and her fail
and deeply interested pupil, betrayed the workings of the temper of the
inward man. It was only in these brief but comprehensive glances that the
feelings by which he was governed might have been, in any manner, traced
to their origin. Still would the nicest observer have been puzzled, if not
baffled, in endeavouring to pronounce on the entire character of the
emotions uppermost in his mind. At instants, it might have been fancied
that some unholy and licentious passion was getting the ascendancy; and
then, as his eye ran rapidly over the chaste and matronly, though still
attractive, countenance of the governess, no imagination was necessary to
read the look of doubt, as well as respect, with which he gazed.

It was while thus occupied that the sports proceeded sometimes humorous,
and forcing smiles even from the lips of the half-terrified Gertrude, but
always tending to that violence, and outbreaking of anger, which might, at
any moment, set at naught the discipline of a vessel in which no other
means to enforce authority existed, than such as its officers could, on
the instant, command. Water had been so lavishly expended, that the decks
were running with the fluid, even more than one flight of spray having
invaded the privileged precincts of the poop. Every ordinary device of
similar scenes had been resorted to, by the men aloft, to annoy their less
advantageously posted shipmates beneath; and such means of retaliation had
been adopted as use or facility rendered obvious. Here, a hog and a
waister were seen swinging against each other, pendant beneath a top;
there, a marine, lashed in the rigging, was obliged to suffer the
manipulation