sinking and his body turning so that he would
ultimately face forward; but still his arms and legs held their
extended position, like those of a speared frog, and the thought
recalled to him an incident of his infancy--a frog-hunt with an older
playmate, his prowess, success, wet feet, and consequent illness. It
had been forgotten for years, but the chain was started, and led to
other memories, long dead, which rose before him. His childhood passed
in review, with its pleasures and griefs; his school-days, with their
sports, conflicts, friends and enemies; college, where he had acquired
the polish to make him petted of all but one--and abhorrent to her.
Almost every person, man or woman, boy or girl, with whom he had
conversed in his whole life, came back and repeated the scene; and as
he passed the lower topsail-yard, nearly head downward, he was
muttering commonplaces to a brown-faced, gray-eyed girl, who listened,
and looked him through and through, and seemed to be wondering why he
existed.

And as he traversed the depth of the lower topsail, turning gradually
on his axis, he lived it over--next to his first voyage, the most
harrowing period of his life: the short two months during which he had
striven vainly to impress this simple-natured sailor-girl with his good
qualities, ending at last with his frantic declaration of a love that
she did not want.

"But it's not the least use, John," she said to him. "I do not love
you, and I cannot. You are a gentleman, as they say, and as such I like
you well enough; but I never can love you, nor any one like you. I've
been among men, real men, all my life, and perhaps have ideals that are
strange to you. John,"--her eyes were wide open in earnestness,--"you
are not a man."

Writhing under her words, which would have been brutal spoken by
another, he cursed, not her, nor himself, but his luck and the fates
that had shaped his life. And next she was showing him the opened door,
saying that she could tolerate profanity in a man, but not in a
gentleman, and that under no circumstances was he to claim her
acquaintance again. Then followed the snubbing in the street, when,
like a lately whipped dog, he had placed himself in her way, hoping she
would notice him; and the long agony of humiliation and despair as his
heart and soul followed her over the seas in her father's ship, until
the seed she had planted--the small suspicion that her words were
true--developed into a wholesom