."

"Vanity, vanity!" I moralised. "To think that this great force for evil
should be swayed by the same sentiment that sets a lassie mincing to her
glass!"

"O! there are double words for everything: the word that swells, the
word that belittles; you cannot fight me with a word!" said he. "You
said the other day that I relied on your conscience: were I in your
humour of detraction, I might say I built upon your vanity. It is your
pretension to be _un homme de parole_; 'tis mine not to accept defeat.
Call it vanity, call it virtue, call it greatness of soul--what
signifies the expression? But recognise in each of us a common strain:
that we both live for an idea."

It will be gathered from so much familiar talk, and so much patience on
both sides, that we now lived together upon excellent terms. Such was
again the fact, and this time more seriously than before. Apart from
disputations such as that which I have tried to reproduce, not only
consideration reigned, but, I am tempted to say, even kindness. When I
fell sick (as I did shortly after our great storm), he sat by my berth
to entertain me with his conversation, and treated me with excellent
remedies, which I accepted with security. Himself commented on the
circumstance. "You see," says he, "you begin to know me better. A very
little while ago, upon this lonely ship, where no one but myself has any
smattering of science, you would have made sure I had designs upon your
life. And, observe, it is since I found you had designs upon my own that
I have shown you most respect. You will tell me if this speaks of a
small mind." I found little to reply. In so far as regarded myself, I
believed him to mean well; I am, perhaps, the more a dupe of his
dissimulation, but I believed (and I still believe) that he regarded me
with genuine kindness. Singular and sad fact! so soon as this change
began, my animosity abated, and these haunting visions of my master
passed utterly away. So that, perhaps, there was truth in the man's last
vaunting word to me, uttered on the twenty-second day of July, when our
long voyage was at last brought almost to an end, and we lay becalmed at
the sea end of the vast harbour of New York, in a gasping heat, which
was presently exchanged for a surprising waterfall of rain. I stood on
the poop, regarding the green shores near at hand, and now and then the
light smoke of the little town, our destination. And as I was even then
devising how to steal a m