ke up to the humblest official connected with
the boat--the night watchman. He snubbed my advances at first, but I
presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him.
So he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck,
and in time he melted into conversation. He could not well have helped
it, I hung with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that
I felt honored by his notice. He told me the names of dim capes and
shadowy islands as we glided by them in the solemnity of the night,
under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking about himself.
He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a
week--or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But
I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved
mountains if it had been applied judiciously. What was it to me that he
was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin? What was it to me that his
grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void
of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in his
conversation? He was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that
was enough for me. As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears
dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.
He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earl or an
alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his
father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the
cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to 'one of
them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which; and by and by
his father died and his mother seized the property and 'shook' him as
he phrased it. After his mother shook him, members of the nobility with
whom he was acquainted used their influence to get him the position of
'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and from that point my watchman threw off all
trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that
bristled all along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so
reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and
the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat
speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.

It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar,
ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the
wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature