licately and insensibly: he, the least
self-conscious of mankind, became an egotist in her dexterous hands. She
found out his pride in his ship, and practiced on it without remorse.
She drew him into talking of the fine qualities of the vessel, of the
great things the vessel had done in emergencies, as he had never in his
life talked yet to any living creature on shore. She found him out in
private seafaring anxieties and unutterable seafaring exultations which
he had kept a secret from his own mate. She watched his kindling face
with a delicious sense of triumph in adding fuel to the fire; she
trapped him into forgetting all considerations of time and place, and
striking as hearty a stroke on the rickety little lodging-house table,
in the fervor of his talk, as if his hand had descended on the
solid bulwark of his ship. His confusion at the discovery of his own
forgetfulness secretly delighted her; she could have cried with pleasure
when he penitently wondered what he could possibly have been thinking
of.

At other times she drew him from dwelling on the pleasures of his life,
and led him into talking of its perils--the perils of that jealous
mistress the sea, which had absorbed so much of his existence, which had
kept him so strangely innocent and ignorant of the world on shore. Twice
he had been shipwrecked. Times innumerable he and all with him had been
threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of
a hair-breadth. He was always unwilling at the outset to speak of this
dark and dreadful side of his life: it was only by adroitly tempting
him, by laying little snares for him in his talk, that she lured him
into telling her of the terrors of the great deep. She sat listening to
him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder,
as those fearful stories--made doubly vivid by the simple language
in which he told them--fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble
unconsciousness of his own heroism--the artless modesty with which
he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage,
without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty
to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed--raised him to
a place in her estimation so hopelessly high above her that she became
uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again which
she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she most rigidly
exacted from him all those little fami