Tassard's berth. But though it was quite likely that the seamen had
plundered these cabins before they left the ship, I was also sure that
the Frenchman had made a clean sweep of what they had overlooked when he
pretended to search for the keys of the treasure-chests; and this
suspicion I seemed to find confirmed by the appearance of the captain's
boxes. One of these boxes contained books, papers, a telescope, some
nautical instruments, and the like. I looked at the books and the
papers, in the hope of finding something to read; but they were written
and printed in the Spanish tongue, and might have been Hebrew for all
the good they were to me.

Our life was extraordinarily dismal and melancholy, how much so I am
unable to express. It was just the same as living in a dungeon. There
was no crevice for the daylight to shine through, and had there been we
must have closed it to keep the cold out. Nothing could be imagined more
gloomy to the spirits than the perpetual night of the schooner's
interior. The furnace, it is true, would, when it flamed heartily, throw
a brightness about it; but often it sank into redness that did but
empurple the gloom. We burned but one candle at a time, and its light
was very small, so that our time was spent chiefly in a sullen twilight.
Added to all this was my dislike of my companion. He would half fuddle
himself with liquor, and in that condition hiccup out twenty kinds of
villainous yarns of piracy, murder, and bloodshed, boasting of the
number of persons he had despatched, of his system of torturing
prisoners to make them confess what they had concealed and where. He
would drivel about his amours, of the style in which he lived when
ashore, and the like; but whether reticence had grown into a habit too
strong even for drink to break down, he never once gave me so much as a
hint touching his youth and early life. He was completely a Frenchman in
his vanity, and you would have thought him entirely odious and
detestable for this excessive quality in him alone. Methinks I see him
now, sitting before me, with one half of him reflecting the light of the
furnace, his little eyes twinkling with a cruel merriment of wine,
telling me a lying story of the adoration of a noble, queenly-looking
captive for his person--some lovely Spanish court lady whom, with
others, they had taken out of a small frigate bound to old Spain. To
test her sincerity he offered to procure her liberty at the first
opportun