iate. The captain had no
powers of invention whatever. He used to say, when asked to tell a
story, that he "might as well try to play the fiddle with a handspike."
But this was no misfortune, for he had read much, and his memory was
good, and supplied him with an endless flow of small-talk on almost
every subject that usually falls under the observation of sea-captains,
and on many subjects besides, about which most sea-captains, or
land-captains, or any other captains whatsoever, are almost totally
ignorant.

Captain Dunning could tell of adventures in the whale-fishery, gone
through either by himself or by friends, that would have made your two
eyes stare out of their two sockets until they looked like saucers (to
use a common but not very correct simile). He could tell the exact
latitude and longitude of almost every important and prominent part of
the globe, and give the distance, pretty nearly, of any one place (on a
large scale) from any other place. He could give the heights of all the
chief mountains in the world to within a few feet, and could calculate,
by merely looking at its current and depth, how many cubic feet of water
any river delivered to the sea per minute. Length, breadth, and
thickness, height, depth, and density, were subjects in which he
revelled, and with which he played as a juggler does with golden balls;
and so great were his powers of numerical calculation, that the sailors
often declared they believed he could work out any calculation backwards
without the use of logarithms! He was constantly instituting
comparisons that were by no means what the proverb terms "odious," but
which were often very astonishing, and in all his stories so many
curious and peculiar facts were introduced, that, as we have already
said, they were very much relished indeed.

Not less relished, however, were Glynn Proctor's astounding and purely
imaginative tales. After the men's minds had been chained intently on
one of the captain's semi-philosophical anecdotes, they turned with
infinite zest to one of Glynn's outrageous flights. Glynn had not read
much in his short life, and his memory was nothing to boast of, but his
imagination was quite gigantic. He could invent almost anything; and
the curious part of it was, that he could do it out of nothing, if need
be. He never took time to consider what he should say. When called on
for a story he began at once, and it flowed from him like a flood of
sparklin