y and Euclid's propositions.

'Cabin, cabin,' the captain repeated.

I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face,
since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he occupied
the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and boxes, and
it would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when by another
right-about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at the blank
space between his shoulders.

Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I
bade him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it was,
and beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready for
hostilities. I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to the
cabin. 'Captain Jasper Welsh,' he was reiterating, as if sounding it to
discover whether it had an ominous ring: it was the captain's name, that
he had learnt from one of the seamen.

Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the
words came: 'A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the vicinity
of the city of Bristol.'

This set Temple off laughing: 'And so he bought a ship and had traps
laid down to catch young fellows for ransom.'

I was obliged to request Temple not to joke, but the next moment I had
launched Captain Jasper Welsh on a piratical exploit; Temple lifted the
veil from his history, revealing him amid the excesses of a cannibal
feast. I dragged him before a British jury; Temple hanged him in view
of an excited multitude. As he boasted that there was the end of Captain
Welsh, I broke the rope. But Temple spoiled my triumph by depriving him
of the use of his lower limbs after the fall, for he was a heavy man. I
could not contradict it, and therefore pitched all his ship's crew upon
the gallows in a rescue. Temple allowed him to be carried off by his
faithful ruffians, only stipulating that the captain was never after
able to release his neck from the hangman's slip knot. The consequence
was that he wore a shirt-collar up to his eyebrows for concealment by
day, and a pillow-case over his head at night, and his wife said she was
a deceived unhappy woman, and died of curiosity.

The talking of even such nonsense as this was a relief to us in our
impatience and helplessness, with the lights of land heaving far distant
to our fretful sight through the cabin windows.

When we had to talk reasonably we were not so successful. Captain Welsh
was one of those me