t the money.' He had me there."

It was a singular tale for a man to tell of himself; above all, in the
midst of our discussion; but it was quite in character for Nares. I
never made a good hit in our disputes, I never justly resented any act
or speech of his, but what I found it long after carefully posted in his
day-book and reckoned (here was the man's oddity) to my credit. It was
the same with his father, whom he had hated; he would give a sketch of
the old fellow, frank and credible, and yet so honestly touched that it
was charming. I have never met a man so strangely constituted: to
possess a reason of the most equal justice, to have his nerves at the
same time quivering with petty spite, and to act upon the nerves and not
the reason.

A kindred wonder in my eyes was the nature of his courage. There was
never a braver man: he went out to welcome danger; an emergency (came it
never so sudden) strung him like a tonic. And yet, upon the other hand,
I have known none so nervous, so oppressed with possibilities, looking
upon the world at large, and the life of a sailor in particular, with so
constant and haggard a consideration of the ugly chances. All his
courage was in blood, not merely cold, but icy with reasoned
apprehension. He would lay our little craft rail under, and "hang on" in
a squall, until I gave myself up for lost, and the men were rushing to
their stations of their own accord. "There," he would say, "I guess
there's not a man on board would have hung on as long as I did that
time: they'll have to give up thinking me no schooner sailor. I guess I
can shave just as near capsizing as any other captain of this vessel,
drunk or sober." And then he would fall to repining and wishing himself
well out of the enterprise, and dilate on the peril of the seas, the
particular dangers of the schooner rig, which he abhorred, the various
ways in which we might go to the bottom, and the prodigious fleet of
ships that have sailed out in the course of history, dwindled from the
eyes of watchers, and returned no more. "Well," he would wind up, "I
guess it don't much matter. I can't see what any one wants to live for,
anyway. If I could get into some one else's apple-tree, and be about
twelve years old, and just stick the way I was, eating stolen apples, I
won't say. But there's no sense in this grown-up business--sailorising,
politics, the piety mill, and all the rest of it. Good clean drowning is
good enough for me." It