e was going to swear,' Temple muttered to me.

I considered the detection of Captain Welsh's hypocrisy unnecessary,
almost a condescension toward familiarity; but the ire in my bosom was
boiling so that I found it impossible to roll out the flood of eloquence
with which I was big. Soon after, I was trying to bribe the man with all
my money and my watch.

'Who gave you that watch?' said he.

'Downright Church catechism!' muttered Temple.

'My grandfather,' said I.

The captain's head went like a mechanical hammer, to express something
indescribable.

'My grandfather,' I continued, 'will pay you handsomely for any service
you do to me and my friend.'

'Now, that's not far off forgoing,' said the captain, in a tone as much
as to say we were bad all over.

I saw the waters slide by his cabin-windows. My desolation, my
humiliation, my chained fury, tumbled together. Out it came--

'Captain, do behave to us like a gentleman, and you shall never repent
it. Our relatives will be miserable about us. They--captain!--they don't
know where we are. We haven't even a change of clothes. Of course we
know we're at your mercy, but do behave like an honest man. You shall be
paid or not, just as you please, for putting us on shore, but we shall
be eternally grateful to you. Of course you mean kindly to us; we see
that--'

'I thank the Lord for it!' he interposed.

'Only you really are under a delusion. It 's extraordinary. You can't be
quite in your right senses about us; you must be--I don't mean to speak
disrespectfully-what we call on shore, cracked about us....

'Doddered, don't they say in one of the shires?' he remarked.

Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I
appealed to his manliness. Why should he take advantage of a couple of
boys? I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings: What misery
were not our friends suffering now. ('Ay, a bucketful now saves an ocean
in time to come!' he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more pathetic
dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.

'Is that Latin or Greek?' he asked.

I would not reply to the cold-blooded question. He said the New
Testament was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could
read it in the original.

'Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship?' said
Temple, an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to the
point than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thou