navigation.'

But the captain answered none the less keenly, 'She had her idea of
navigating, as the devil of mischief always has, in the direction where
there's most to corrupt; and, my lad, she teaches the navigation that
leads to the bottom beneath us.'

He might be right, still our mien was evil in reciting the lessons from
Scripture; and though Captain Welsh had intelligence we could not draw
into it the how and the why of the indignity we experienced. We had
rather he had been a savage captain, to have braced our spirits to sturdy
resistance, instead of a mild, good-humoured man of kind intentions, who
lent us his linen to wear, fed us at his table, and taxed our most
gentlemanly feelings to find excuses for him. Our way of revenging
ourselves becomingly was to laud the heroes of antiquity, as if they had
possession of our souls and touched the fountain of worship. Whenever
Captain Welsh exclaimed, 'Well done,' or the equivalent, 'That 's an
idea,' we referred him to Plutarch for our great exemplar. It was
Alcibiades gracefully consuming his black broth that won the captain's
thanks for theological acuteness, or the young Telemachus suiting his
temper to the dolphin's moods, since he must somehow get on shore on the
dolphin's back. Captain Welsh could not perceive in Temple the
personifier of Alcibiades, nor Telemachus in me; but he was aware of an
obstinate obstruction behind our compliance. This he called the devil
coiled like a snake in its winter sleep. He hurled texts at it openly, or
slyly dropped a particularly heavy one, in the hope of surprising it with
a death-blow. We beheld him poring over his Bible for texts that should
be sovereign medicines for us, deadly for the devil within us.
Consequently, we were on the defensive: bits of Cicero, bits of Seneca,
soundly and nobly moral, did service on behalf of Paganism; we remembered
them certainly almost as if an imp had brought them from afar. Nor had we
any desire to be in opposition to the cause he supported. What we were
opposed to was the dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man, who had
his one specific for everything, and saw mortal sickness in all other
remedies or recreations. Temple said to him,

'If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to tell me Greek and Latin authors
are bad for me, I should listen to his remarks, because he 's a scholar:
he knows the languages and knows what they contain.'

Captain Welsh replied,

'If the Archbishop o' C