aside, she is a woman of an excellent memory. Whether she forgives or
not I know not; but she certainly doesn't forget. Doubtless, virtue is
its own reward; but there is a double satisfaction in being polite to a
person on whom it _tells_. Another reason for my pleasant relations with
the Captain is, that I afford him a chance to rub up his rusty old
cosmopolitanism, and trot out his little scraps of old-fashioned
reading, some of which are very curious. It is a great treat for him to
spin his threadbare yarns over again to a sympathetic listener. These
warm July evenings, in the sweet-smelling garden, are just the proper
setting for his amiable garrulities. An odd enough relation subsists
between us on this point. Like many gentlemen of his calling, the
Captain is harassed by an irresistible desire to romance, even on the
least promising themes; and it is vastly amusing to observe how he will
auscultate, as it were, his auditor's inmost mood, to ascertain whether
it is prepared for the absorption of his insidious fibs. Sometimes they
perish utterly in the transition: they are very pretty, I conceive, in
the deep and briny well of the Captain's fancy; but they won't bear
being transplanted into the shallow inland lakes of my land-bred
apprehension. At other times, the auditor being in a dreamy,
sentimental, and altogether unprincipled mood, he will drink the old
man's salt-water by the bucketful and feel none the worse for it. Which
is the worse, wilfully to tell, or wilfully to believe, a pretty little
falsehood which will not hurt any one? I suppose you can't believe
wilfully; you only pretend to believe. My part of the game, therefore,
is certainly as bad as the Captain's. Perhaps I take kindly to his
beautiful perversions of fact, because I am myself engaged in one,
because I am sailing under false colors of the deepest dye. I wonder
whether my friends have any suspicion of the real state of the case. How
should they? I fancy, that, on the whole, I play my part pretty well. I
am delighted to find it come so easy. I do not mean that I experience
little difficulty in foregoing my hundred petty elegancies and
luxuries,--for to these, thank Heaven, I was not so indissolubly wedded
that one wholesome shock could not loosen my bonds,--but that I manage
more cleverly than I expected to stifle those innumerable tacit
allusions which might serve effectually to belie my character.

* * * * *

_