He was a shy, nervous little man, and though Kettle had usually a fine contempt for all weakness, somehow his heart went out to this retiring passenger almost at first sight.  Myself, I am inclined to think it was because he knew him to be hunted, knew him to be the object of a murderous conspiracy, and loathed most thoroughly the vulgar rogue who was his treacherous enemy.  But Captain Kettle scouts the idea that he was stirred by any such feeble, womanish motives.  Kettle was a poet himself, and with the kinship of species he felt the poetic fire glowing out from the person of this Mr. Hamilton.  At least, so he says; and if he has deceived himself on the matter, which, from an outsider’s point of view, seems likely, I am sure the error is quite unconscious.  The little sailor may have his faults, as the index of these pages has shown; but untruthfulness has never been set down to his tally, and I am not going to accuse him of it now.

Still, it is a sure thing that talk on the subject of verse making did not come at once.  Kettle was immensely sensitive about his accomplishment, and had writhed under brutal scoffs and polished ridicule at his poetry more times than he cared to count.  With passengers especially he kept it scrupulously in the background, even as he did his talent for making sweet music on the accordion.

But somehow he and Hamilton, after a few days’ acquaintance, seemed to glide into the subject imperceptibly.  Mutual confidences followed in the course of nature.  It seemed that Hamilton too, like Kettle, was a devotee of the stiller forms of verse.

“You see, Skipper,” he said, “I’ve been a pretty bad lot, and I’ve made things hum most of my time, and so I suppose I get my hankerings after restfulness as the natural result of contrast.”

“Same here, sir.  Ashore I can respect myself, and in our chapel circle, though I say it myself, you’ll find few more respected men.  But at sea I shouldn’t like to tell you what I’ve done; I shouldn’t like to tell any one.  If a saint has to come down and skipper the brutes we have to ship as sailormen nowadays, he’d wear out his halo flinging it at them.  And when matters have been worst, and I’ve been bashing the hands about, or doing things to carry out an owner’s order that I’d blush even to think of ashore, why then, sir, gentle verse, to tunes I know, seems to bubble up inside me like springs in a barren land.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Hamilton doubtfully, “but when I get thoroughly sick of myself, and wish I was dead, I sometimes stave off putting a shot through my silly head by getting a pencil and paper, and shifting my thoughts out of the beastly world I know, into—­well, it’s hard to explain.  But I get sort of notions, don’t you see, and they seem to run best in verse.  I write ’em when the fit’s on me, and I burn ’em when the fit’s through; and you’ll hardly think it, but I never told a living soul I ever did such a thing till I told you this minute.  My set—­I mean, I couldn’t bear to be laughed at.  But you seem to be a fellow that’s been in much the same sort of box yourself.”