profoundly dejected.

He was often thus when communing with himself on board ship in the
quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone. This
inscrutable man never felt more alone than when surrounded by his dogs.
They were socially so inferior to him.

Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at
this date set the country in a blaze; but as those who read between the
lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school;
and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed
they are largely concerned. Thus it was offensive to him even now to
board a ship in the same dress in which he grappled her; and he still
adhered in his walk to the school's distinguished slouch. But above all
he retained the passion for good form.

Good form! However much he may have degenerated, he still knew that this
is all that really matters.

From far within him he heard a creaking as of rusty portals, and
through them came a stern tap-tap-tap, like hammering in the night when
one cannot sleep. 'Have you been good form to-day?' was their eternal
question.

'Fame, fame, that glittering bauble, it is mine,' he cried.

'Is it quite good form to be distinguished at anything?' the tap-tap
from his school replied.

'I am the only man whom Barbecue feared,' he urged; 'and Flint himself
feared Barbecue.'

'Barbecue, Flint--what house?' came the cutting retort.

Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about
good form?

His vitals were tortured by this problem. It was a claw within him
sharper than the iron one; and as it tore him, the perspiration dripped
down his tallow countenance and streaked his doublet. Ofttimes he drew
his sleeve across his face, but there was no damming that trickle.

Ah, envy not Hook.

There came to him a presentiment of his early dissolution. It was as if
Peter's terrible oath had boarded the ship. Hook felt a gloomy desire
to make his dying speech, lest presently there should be no time for it.

'Better for Hook,' he cried, 'if he had had less ambition.' It was in
his darkest hours only that he referred to himself in the third person.

'No little children love me.'

Strange that he should think of this, which had never troubled him
before; perhaps the sewing machine brought it to his mind. For long he
muttered to himself, staring at Smee, who was hemming placidly, under
the conviction that all children fe