,
but I would rather have found myself on board a different style of
craft. The cabin passengers were going out to join one of the
establishments of the great Fur Trading Company on the Columbia river.
They were pleasant, gentlemanly-looking men, and I longed to introduce
myself to them, as I was beginning to get somewhat weary of the rough
characters with whom I was doomed to associate. But from what the men
told me, I felt sure that if I did so I should make the captain my
enemy. He and they were evidently not on good terms. I got on,
however, pretty well with the crew, and as I could speak a little
French, I used to talk to the Frenchmen in their own language, my
mistakes affording them considerable amusement, though, as they
corrected me, I gradually improved.

Among the crew were two other persons whom I will particularly mention.
One went by the name of "Old Tom." He was relatively old with regard to
the rest of our shipmates, rather than old in years--a wiry, active,
somewhat wizen-faced man, with broad shoulders, and possessing great
muscular strength. I suspected from the first, from the way he spoke,
that he was not a Yankee born. His language, when talking to me, was
always correct, without any nasal twang; and that he was a man of some
education I was convinced, when I heard him once quote, as if speaking
to himself, a line of Horace. He never smiled, and there was a
melancholy expression on his countenance, which made me fancy that
something weighed on his mind. He did not touch spirits, but his short
pipe was seldom out of his mouth. When, however, he sat with the rest
in the forecastle berth, his manner completely changed, and he talked,
and argued, and wrangled, and guessed, and calculated, with as much
vehemence as any one, entering with apparent zest into their ribald
conversation, though even then the most humorous remark or jest failed
to draw forth a laugh from his lips.

STORY ONE, CHAPTER 4.

The other person was a lad a couple of years my senior, called always
"Young Sam," apparently one of those unhappy waifs cast on the bleak
world without relations or friends to care for him. He was a fine young
fellow, with a blue laughing eye, dauntless and active, and promised to
become a good seaman. In spite of the rough treatment he often received
from his shipmates, he kept up his spirits, and as our natures in that
respect assimilated, I felt drawn towards him. The only person who