myself to guide infancy, to console
age, to succor the orphan, and support the widow,--morally, I mean."

"I begin to suspect you are a most artful vagabond," said he half
angrily.

"I have long since reconciled myself to the thought of an unjust
appreciation," said I. "It is the consolation dull men accept when
confronted with those of original genius. You can't help confessing that
all your distrust of me has grown out of the superiority of my powers,
and the humble figure you have presented in comparison with me."

"Do you rank modesty amongst these same powers?" he asked slyly.

"Modesty I reject," said I, "as being a conventional form of hypocrisy."

"Come down below," said he, "and take a glass of brandy and water. It
's growing chilly here, and we shall be the better of something to cheer
us."

Seated in his comfortable little cabin, and with a goodly array of
liquors before me to choose from, I really felt a self-confidence in the
fact that, if I were not something out of the common, I could not then
be there. "There must be in my nature," thought I, "that element which
begets success, or I could not always find myself in situations so
palpably beyond the accidents of my condition."

My host was courtesy itself; no sooner was I his guest than he adopted
towards me a manner of perfect politeness. No more allusions to my
precarious mode of life, never once a reference to my adventurous
future. Indeed, with an almost artful exercise of good breeding, he
turned the conversation towards himself, and gave me a sketch of his own
life.

It was not in any respects a remarkable one; though it had its share of
those mishaps and misfortunes which every sailor must have confronted.
He was wrecked in the Pacific, and robbed in the Havannah; had his crew
desert him at San Francisco, and was boarded by Riff pirates, and sold
in Barbary just as every other blue jacket used to be; and I listened
to the story, only marvelling what a dreary sameness pervades all these
narratives. Why, for one trait of the truthful to prove his tale, I
could have invented fifty. There were no little touches of sentiment
or feeling, no relieving lights of human emotion, in his story. I never
felt, as I listened, any wish that he should be saved from shipwreck,
baffle his persecutors, or escape his captors; and I thought to myself,
"This fellow has certainly got no narrative gusto." Now for _my_ turn:
we had each of us partaken freely of the