shaking
his head in a despondent manner, went in to look for it.

Captain Cuttle descended slowly to the little back parlour, and, seated
in his accustomed chair, looked for it in the fire; but it was not
there, though the fire was bright. He took out his tobacco-box and pipe,
and composing himself to smoke, looked for it in the red glow from the
bowl, and in the wreaths of vapour that curled upward from his lips; but
there was not so much as an atom of the rust of Hope's anchor in either.
He tried a glass of grog; but melancholy truth was at the bottom of that
well, and he couldn't finish it. He made a turn or two in the shop, and
looked for Hope among the instruments; but they obstinately worked out
reckonings for the missing ship, in spite of any opposition he could
offer, that ended at the bottom of the lone sea.

The wind still rushing, and the rain still pattering, against the closed
shutters, the Captain brought to before the wooden Midshipman upon the
counter, and thought, as he dried the little officer's uniform with
his sleeve, how many years the Midshipman had seen, during which few
changes--hardly any--had transpired among his ship's company; how the
changes had come all together, one day, as it might be; and of what a
sweeping kind they web Here was the little society of the back parlour
broken up, and scattered far and wide. Here was no audience for Lovely
Peg, even if there had been anybody to sing it, which there was not; for
the Captain was as morally certain that nobody but he could execute that
ballad, he was that he had not the spirit, under existing circumstances,
to attempt it. There was no bright face of 'Wal'r' In the house;--here
the Captain transferred his sleeve for a moment from the Midshipman's
uniform to his own cheek;--the familiar wig and buttons of Sol Gills
were a vision of the past; Richard Whittington was knocked on the
head; and every plan and project in connexion with the Midshipman, lay
drifting, without mast or rudder, on the waste of waters.

As the Captain, with a dejected face, stood revolving these thoughts,
and polishing the Midshipman, partly in the tenderness of old
acquaintance, and partly in the absence of his mind, a knocking at
the shop-door communicated a frightful start to the frame of Rob the
Grinder, seated on the counter, whose large eyes had been intently fixed
on the Captain's face, and who had been debating within himself, for the
five hundredth time, whether