om Mr Perch, on the occasion of
his next visit, by dryly informing that gentleman, that he thanked him
for his company, but had cut himself adrift from all such acquaintance,
as he didn't know what magazine he mightn't blow up, without meaning of
it. In this self-imposed retirement, the Captain passed whole days and
weeks without interchanging a word with anyone but Rob the Grinder, whom
he esteemed as a pattern of disinterested attachment and fidelity. In
this retirement, the Captain, gazing at the packet of an evening, would
sit smoking, and thinking of Florence and poor Walter, until they both
seemed to his homely fancy to be dead, and to have passed away into
eternal youth, the beautiful and innocent children of his first
remembrance.

The Captain did not, however, in his musings, neglect his own
improvement, or the mental culture of Rob the Grinder. That young man
was generally required to read out of some book to the Captain, for one
hour, every evening; and as the Captain implicitly believed that all
books were true, he accumulated, by this means, many remarkable facts.
On Sunday nights, the Captain always read for himself, before going to
bed, a certain Divine Sermon once delivered on a Mount; and although he
was accustomed to quote the text, without book, after his own manner,
he appeared to read it with as reverent an understanding of its heavenly
spirit, as if he had got it all by heart in Greek, and had been able
to write any number of fierce theological disquisitions on its every
phrase.

Rob the Grinder, whose reverence for the inspired writings, under
the admirable system of the Grinders' School, had been developed by
a perpetual bruising of his intellectual shins against all the proper
names of all the tribes of Judah, and by the monotonous repetition of
hard verses, especially by way of punishment, and by the parading of him
at six years old in leather breeches, three times a Sunday, very high
up, in a very hot church, with a great organ buzzing against his drowsy
head, like an exceedingly busy bee--Rob the Grinder made a mighty show
of being edified when the Captain ceased to read, and generally yawned
and nodded while the reading was in progress. The latter fact being
never so much as suspected by the good Captain.

Captain Cuttle, also, as a man of business; took to keeping books. In
these he entered observations on the weather, and on the currents of the
waggons and other vehicles: which he obser