hstanding the
sullen silence, the gloomy frown on his knitted brow, and the general
air of despair that pervades the external man.

"There!" he exclaims, having improved the personal of the inebriate, and
folding his arms as he steps back apace to have a better view of his
pupil--"now, don't think of being triced up in this dreary vault. Be
cheerful, brace up your resolution--never let the devil think you know
he is trying to put the last seal on your fate--never!" Having slipped
the black kerchief from his own neck, he secures it about Tom's, adjusts
the shark's bone at the throat, and mounts the braid hat upon his head
with a hearty blow on the crown. "Look at yourself! They'd mistake you
for a captain of the foretop," he pursues, and good-naturedly he lays
his broad, browned hands upon Tom's shoulders, and forces him up to a
triangular bit of glass secured with three tacks to the wall.

Tom's hands wander down his sides as he contemplates himself in the
glass, saying: "I look a shade up, I reckon! And I feel--I have to thank
you for it, Spunyarn--something different all over me. God bless you! I
won't forget you. But I'm hungry; that's all that ails me now.

"I may thank my mother--"

"Thank yourself, Tom," interposes the sailor.

"For all this. She has driven me to this; yes, she has made my soul dead
with despair!" And he bursts into a wild, fierce laugh. A moment's
pause, and he says, in a subdued voice, "I'm a slave, a fool, a wanderer
in search of his own distress."

The kind-hearted sailor seats his pupil upon a board bench, and proceeds
down stairs, where, with the bribe of a glass of whiskey, he induces the
negro cook to prepare for Tom a bowl of coffee and a biscuit. In truth,
we must confess, that Spunyarn was so exceedingly liberal of his
friendship that he would at times appropriate to himself the personal
effects of his neighbors. But we must do him justice by saying that this
was only when a friend in need claimed his attention. And this generous
propensity he the more frequently exercised upon the effects--whiskey,
cold ham, crackers and cheese--of the vote-cribber, whom he regards as a
sort of cold-hearted land-lubber, whose political friends outside were
not what they should be. If the vote-cribber's aristocratic friends (and
South Carolina politicians were much given to dignity and bad whiskey)
sent him luxuries that tantalized the appetites of poverty-oppressed
debtors, and poor prisoners sta