parole; and was silent. "Can you not tell me the circumstances?" suggested, at length.
He had been watching me eagerly. But he shook his head now, sighed and drew a small Bible from his pocket. "I am not a gentleman, sir, I laid it before the Lord: but," he continued naïvely, "I wanted to learn how a gentleman would look at it." He searched for a text, turning the pages with long, nervous fingers; but desisted with another sigh, and a moment later was summoned away to solve some difficulty with the ship's reckoning.
My respect for the Captain had been steadily growing. He was so amiable too, so untiringly courteous; he bore his sorrow—whatever the cause might be—with so gentle a resignation, that I caught myself pitying even while I cursed him and his crew for their inhuman reticence.
But my respect vanished pretty quickly next day. We were seated at dinner in the main cabin, the captain at the head of the table, and, as usual, crumbling his biscuit in a sort of waking trance—when Mr. Reuben Colenso, his eldest son, and acting mate, put his solemn face in at the door with news of a sail about four miles distant on the lee bow. I followed the captain on deck. The stranger, a schooner, had been lying-to when first described in the hazy weather; but was standing now to intercept us. At two miles distance—it being then about two o'clock—I saw that she hoisted British colours.
"But that flag was never sewn in England," Captain Colenso observed, studying her through his glass. His cheeks, usually of that pallid ivory colour proper to old age, were flushed with a faint carmine, and I observed a suppressed excitement in all his crew. For my part, I expected no better than to play target in the coming engagement; but it surprised me that he served out no cutlasses, ordered up no powder from the hold, or, in short,
