t all. The temper of the man was very slow to move,
as generally happens with deep-chested men, and a little girl might
lead him with her finger on the shore; and he liked to try to smell
land flowers, which in his opinion were but weeds. But if a man can not
control his heart, in the very middle of his system, how can he hope to
command his skin, that unscientific frontier of his frame?

"Nicholas the fish," as his neighbors (whenever, by coming ashore, he
had such treasures) contemptuously called him, was endowed from his
birth with a peculiar skin, and by exercise had improved it. Its virtue
was excessive thickness--such as a writer should pray for--protected
also by powerful hairiness--largely admired by those with whom it is
restricted to the head.

Unhappily for Nicholas, the peremptory poises of nature struck a line
with him, and this was his line of flotation. From perpetual usage this
was drawn, obliquely indeed, but as definitely as it is upon a ship of
uniform displacement--a yacht, for instance, or a man-of-war. Below
that line scarcely anything could hurt him; but above it he was most
sensitive, unless he were continually wetted; and the flies, and the
gnats, and many other plagues of England, with one accord pitched
upon him, and pitched into him, during his short dry intervals, with a
bracing sense of saline draught. Also the sun, and the wind, and even
the moon, took advantage of him when unwetted.

This made his dry periods a purgatory to him; and no sooner did he hear
from Mr. Mordacks of a promising job under water than he drew breath
enough for a ten-fathom dive, and bursting from long despair, made a
great slap at the flies beneath his collar-bone. The sound was like
a drum which two men strike; and his wife, who was devoted to him,
hastened home from the adjoining parish with a sad presentiment of
parting. And this was speedily verified; for the champion swimmer and
diver set forth that very day for Bempton Warren, where he was to have a
private meeting with the general factor.

Now it was a great mistake to think--as many people at this time did,
both in Yorkshire and Derbyshire--that the gulf of connubial cares had
swallowed the great Roman hero Mordacks. Unarmed, and even without his
gallant roadster to support him, he had leaped into that Curtian lake,
and had fought a good fight at the bottom of it. The details are highly
interesting, and the chronicle might be useful; but, alas! there is n