an than be
obliged to follow the sea for the remainder of his life, I thought
nothing of that; sailors--like everybody else--are possessed of a rooted
conviction that wealth is the panacea of all evils. By the time that I
had reached this point in my mental argument it was eight bells, and,
Forbes coming on deck to relieve me, I went to my cabin more than half
convinced that Joe had, after all, discovered a mare's nest; and having
thus argued myself into a more comfortable frame of mind, I lay down and
slept soundly until I was called by the steward at my usual hour of
rising.

I will do Joe the justice to say that, having settled in his mind the
part that he would play in the drama that he believed was evolving
itself on board the barque, he thenceforth played it to the life, and
with a skill so consummate as to deceive the most suspicious. He
assumed the role of a man who, if let alone, would be willing enough to
do his duty honestly, and to the best of his ability, but who could not
and would not tolerate the smallest measure of injustice. And he gave
himself all the airs of an aggrieved person--of one who has been harshly
treated for a trivial fault; his whole manner was the very impersonation
of sullen resentment, and the careless, slovenly way in which he
performed his duties was a constant source of provocation to me, even
though I knew--or thought I knew--that it was all assumed. So
exasperating was he that sometimes I even doubted whether his behaviour
really was assumption--whether, after all, I had not been deceived in
the man; whether it was not rather his former good behaviour that was
assumed, while his present delinquencies were the result of an outbreak
of irrepressible evil in him. There were even times when I asked myself
whether he might not be a ringleader in the very plot he professed to be
so anxious to discover, and whether his anxiety to enlighten me might
not be assumed for the purpose of blinding and misleading me the more
effectually. Never in all my life had I witnessed so thorough and
radical a change in any one as seemed to have come over Joe Martin. But
a quiet word or two with him, or a glance into his honest eyes when no
one was near enough at hand to read their expression, always sufficed to
reassure me as to his absolute fidelity. Since it was possible for him
to make me doubt him, despite the many evidences he had afforded me of
his honesty, it is not to be wondered at that Si