while to lose so
much time for the sake of one so dear as a second son. To this address
the Captain, supposing him either to be drunk or disordered in his
mind, made no other reply than to knock him incontinently down upon the
deck, bidding him return forward where he belonged.

Thereafter poor Dunburne found himself enjoying the reputation of a
harmless madman. The name of the Earl of Rags was bestowed upon him,
and the miserable companions of his wretched plight were never tired of
tempting him to recount his adventures, for the sake of entertaining
themselves by teasing that which they supposed to be his hapless mania.

Nor is it easy to conceive of all the torments that those miserable,
obscene wretches were able to inflict upon him. Under the teasing sting
of his companions' malevolent pleasantries, there were times when
Dunburne might, as he confessed to himself, have committed a murder
with the greatest satisfaction in the world. However, he was endowed
with no small command of self-restraint, so that he was still able to
curb his passions within the bounds of reason and of policy. He was,
fortunately, a complete master of the French and Italian languages, so
that when the fury of his irritation would become too excessive for him
to control, he would ease his spirits by castigating his tormentors
with a consuming verbosity in those foreign tongues, which, had his
companions understood a single word of that which he uttered, would
have earned for him a beating that would have landed him within an inch
of his life. However, they attributed all that he said to the
irrational gibbering of a maniac.

About midway of their voyage the _Prophet Daniel_ encountered a
tremendous storm, which drove her so far out of the Captain's reckoning
that when land was sighted, in the afternoon of a tempestuous day in
the latter part of August, the first mate, who had been for some years
in the New England trade, opined that it was the coast of Rhode Island,
and that if the Captain chose to do so he might run into New Hope
Harbor and lie there until the southeaster had blown itself out. This
advice the Captain immediately put into execution, so that by nightfall
they had dropped anchor in the comparative quiet of that excellent
harbor.

Dunburne was a most excellent and practised swimmer. That evening, when
the dusk had pretty well fallen, he jumped overboard, dived under the
brig, and came up on the other side. Thus leaving all