she’s that.  The ports of the world are thick with people ready to kick a captain into the penitentiary if he’s not as bright as a dollar and as honest as the morning star; and what with Lloyd keeping watch and watch in every corner of the three oceans, and the insurance leeches, and the consuls, and the customs bugs, and the medicos, you can only get the idea by thinking of a landsman watched by a hundred and fifty detectives, or a stranger in a village Down East.”

“Well, but at sea?” I said.

“You make me tired,” retorted the captain.  “What’s the use—­at sea?  Everything’s got to come to bearings at some port, hasn’t it?  You can’t stop at sea for ever, can you?—­No; the Flying Scud is rubbish; if it meant anything, it would have to mean something so almighty intricate that James G. Blaine hasn’t got the brains to engineer it; and I vote for more axeing, pioneering, and opening up the resources of this phenomenal brig, and less general fuss,” he added, arising.  “The dime-museum symptoms will drop in of themselves, I guess, to keep us cheery.”

But it appeared we were at the end of discoveries for the day; and we left the brig about sundown, without being further puzzled or further enlightened.  The best of the cabin spoils—­books, instruments, papers, silks, and curiosities—­we carried along with us in a blanket, however, to divert the evening hours; and when supper was over, and the table cleared, and Johnson set down to a dreary game of cribbage between his right hand and his left, the captain and I turned out our blanket on the floor, and sat side by side to examine and appraise the spoils.

The books were the first to engage our notice.  These were rather numerous (as Nares contemptuously put it) “for a lime-juicer.”  Scorn of the British mercantile marine glows in the breast of every Yankee merchant captain; as the scorn is not reciprocated, I can only suppose it justified in fact; and certainly the old country mariner appears of a less studious disposition.  The more credit to the officers of the Flying Scud, who had quite a library, both literary and professional.  There were Findlay’s five directories of the world—­all broken-backed, as is usual with Findlay, and all marked and scribbled over with corrections and additions—­several books of navigation, a signal code, and an Admiralty book of a sort of orange hue, called Islands of the Eastern Pacific Ocean, Vol.  III., which appeared from its imprint to be the latest authority, and showed marks of frequent consultation in the passages about the French Frigate Shoals, the Harman, Cure, Pearl, and Hermes reefs, Lisiansky Island, Ocean Island, and the place where we then lay—­Brooks or Midway.  A volume of Macaulay’s Essays and a shilling Shakespeare led the van of the belles lettres; the rest were novels:  several Miss Braddons—­of course, Aurora Floyd, which has penetrated to every isle of the Pacific, a good many cheap detective books, Rob Roy, Auerbach’s Auf der Hohe in the German, and a prize temperance story, pillaged (to judge by the stamp) from an Anglo-Indian circulating library.