self grew stronger too.

* * * * *

What made it all the easier to keep--I mean the resolution--was that
Powell's sentiment of amused surprise at what struck him at first as mere
absurdity was not unmingled with indignation. And his years were too
few, his position too novel, his reliance on his own opinion not yet firm
enough to allow him to express it with any effect. And then--what would
have been the use, anyhow--and where was the necessity?

But this thing, familiar and mysterious at the same time, occupied his
imagination. The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the
facts of one's experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the
world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of
the round horizon. He viewed the apoplectic, goggle-eyed mate and the
saturnine, heavy-eyed steward as the victims of a peculiar and secret
form of lunacy which poisoned their lives. But he did not give them his
sympathy on that account. No. That strange affliction awakened in him a
sort of suspicious wonder.

Once--and it was at night again; for the officers of the _Ferndale_
keeping watch and watch as was customary in those days, had but few
occasions for intercourse--once, I say, the thick Mr. Franklin, a
quaintly bulky figure under the stars, the usual witnesses of his
outpourings, asked him with an abruptness which was not callous, but in
his simple way:

"I believe you have no parents living?"

Mr. Powell said that he had lost his father and mother at a very early
age.

"My mother is still alive," declared Mr. Franklin in a tone which
suggested that he was gratified by the fact. "The old lady is lasting
well. Of course she's got to be made comfortable. A woman must be
looked after, and, if it comes to that, I say, give me a mother. I dare
say if she had not lasted it out so well I might have gone and got
married. I don't know, though. We sailors haven't got much time to look
about us to any purpose. Anyhow, as the old lady was there I haven't, I
may say, looked at a girl in all my life. Not that I wasn't partial to
female society in my time," he added with a pathetic intonation, while
the whites of his goggle eyes gleamed amorously under the clear night
sky. "Very partial, I may say."

Mr. Powell was amused; and as these communications took place only when
the mate was relieved off duty he had no serious objection to them. The
mate's presence made the first half-hou