well he had taken
of him; unaccountably fervent at the time, but quite intelligible now: a
terrible apprehension strengthened on the Captain, that, overpowered
by his anxieties and regrets for Walter, he had been driven to commit
suicide. Unequal to the wear and tear of daily life, as he had
often professed himself to be, and shaken as he no doubt was by the
uncertainty and deferred hope he had undergone, it seemed no violently
strained misgiving, but only too probable. Free from debt, and with no
fear for his personal liberty, or the seizure of his goods, what else
but such a state of madness could have hurried him away alone and
secretly? As to his carrying some apparel with him, if he had really
done so--and they were not even sure of that--he might have done so,
the Captain argued, to prevent inquiry, to distract attention from his
probable fate, or to ease the very mind that was now revolving all these
possibilities. Such, reduced into plain language, and condensed within
a small compass, was the final result and substance of Captain Cuttle's
deliberations: which took a long time to arrive at this pass, and were,
like some more public deliberations, very discursive and disorderly.

Dejected and despondent in the extreme, Captain Cuttle felt it just to
release Rob from the arrest in which he had placed him, and to enlarge
him, subject to a kind of honourable inspection which he still resolved
to exercise; and having hired a man, from Brogley the Broker, to sit in
the shop during their absence, the Captain, taking Rob with him, issued
forth upon a dismal quest after the mortal remains of Solomon Gills.

Not a station-house, or bone-house, or work-house in the metropolis
escaped a visitation from the hard glazed hat. Along the wharves, among
the shipping on the bank-side, up the river, down the river, here,
there, everywhere, it went gleaming where men were thickest, like the
hero's helmet in an epic battle. For a whole week the Captain read of
all the found and missing people in all the newspapers and handbills,
and went forth on expeditions at all hours of the day to identify
Solomon Gills, in poor little ship-boys who had fallen overboard, and in
tall foreigners with dark beards who had taken poison--'to make sure,'
Captain Cuttle said, 'that it wam't him.' It is a sure thing that it
never was, and that the good Captain had no other satisfaction.

Captain Cuttle at last abandoned these attempts as hopeless, and se