friend has sent me a new book, from England--THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM
RESTATED--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years'
interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited
once more. It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book--away
back in the ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my
pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the
PENNSYLVANIA, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George
Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many
months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight
watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and
correction of the master. He was a prime chess-player and an idolater of
Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost
his official dignity something to do that. Also--quite uninvited--he
would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when
it was his watch and I was steering. He read well, but not profitably
for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. That
broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree,
in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an
ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were
Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's. For instance:

What man dare, _I_ dare!

Approach thou WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of
an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged
Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she goes! meet her, meet
her! didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if you crowded in like that?
Hyrcan tiger; take any ship but that and my firm nerves she'll be in the
WOODS the first you know! stop he 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 with
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