he worthy Captain had ever felt himself quite
abandoned until now; but now, old Sol Gills, Walter, and Heart's Delight
were lost to him indeed, and now Mr Carker deceived and jeered him
cruelly. They were all represented in the false Rob, to whom he had held
forth many a time on the recollections that were warm within him; he had
believed in the false Rob, and had been glad to believe in him; he had
made a companion of him as the last of the old ship's company; he had
taken the command of the little Midshipman with him at his right hand;
he had meant to do his duty by him, and had felt almost as kindly
towards the boy as if they had been shipwrecked and cast upon a desert
place together. And now, that the false Rob had brought distrust,
treachery, and meanness into the very parlour, which was a kind of
sacred place, Captain Cuttle felt as if the parlour might have gone down
next, and not surprised him much by its sinking, or given him any very
great concern.

Therefore Captain Cuttle read the newspaper with profound attention and
no comprehension, and therefore Captain Cuttle said nothing whatever
about Rob to himself, or admitted to himself that he was thinking about
him, or would recognise in the most distant manner that Rob had anything
to do with his feeling as lonely as Robinson Crusoe.

In the same composed, business-like way, the Captain stepped over
to Leadenhall Market in the dusk, and effected an arrangement with a
private watchman on duty there, to come and put up and take down the
shutters of the wooden Midshipman every night and morning. He then
called in at the eating-house to diminish by one half the daily rations
theretofore supplied to the Midshipman, and at the public-house to stop
the traitor's beer. 'My young man,' said the Captain, in explanation to
the young lady at the bar, 'my young man having bettered himself, Miss.'
Lastly, the Captain resolved to take possession of the bed under the
counter, and to turn in there o' nights instead of upstairs, as sole
guardian of the property.

From this bed Captain Cuttle daily rose thenceforth, and clapped on
his glazed hat at six o'clock in the morning, with the solitary air of
Crusoe finishing his toilet with his goat-skin cap; and although his
fears of a visitation from the savage tribe, MacStinger, were somewhat
cooled, as similar apprehensions on the part of that lone mariner
used to be by the lapse of a long interval without any symptoms of the
canni