I could not say he had been misinformed.

“You yourself escaped on that occasion, I think.”

It was true.  Being usually the hero of my own stories, I commonly do manage to live through one, in order to figure to advantage in the next.  It is from artistic necessity:  no reader would take much interest in a hero who was dead before the beginning of the tale.  I endeavored to explain this to Captain Abersouth.  He shook his head.

“No,” said he, “it’s cowardly, that’s the way I look at it.”

Suddenly an effulgent idea began to dawn upon me, and I let it have its way until my mind was perfectly luminous.  Then I rose from my seat, and frowning down into the upturned face of my accuser, spoke in severe and rasping accents thus: 

“Captain Abersouth, in the various perils you and I have encountered together in the classical literature of the period, if I have always escaped and you have always perished; if I lost you at sea in the Mudlark, froze you into the ice at the South Pole in the Camel and drowned you in the Nupple-duck, pray be good enough to tell me whom I have the honor to address.”

It was a blow to the poor man:  no one was ever so disconcerted.  Flinging aside his novel, he put up his hands and began to scratch his head and think.  It was beautiful to see him think, but it seemed to distress him and pointing significantly over the side of the raft I suggested as delicately as possible that it was time to act.  He rose to his feet and fixing upon me a look of reproach which I shall remember as long as I can, cast himself into the deep.  As to me—­I escaped.

A CARGO OF CAT

On the 16th day of June, 1874, the ship Mary Jane sailed from Malta, heavily laden with cat.  This cargo gave us a good deal of trouble.  It was not in bales, but had been dumped into the hold loose.  Captain Doble, who had once commanded a ship that carried coals, said he had found that plan the best.  When the hold was full of cat the hatch was battened down and we felt good.  Unfortunately the mate, thinking the cats would be thirsty, introduced a hose into one of the hatches and pumped in a considerable quantity of water, and the cats of the lower levels were all drowned.

You have seen a dead cat in a pond:  you remember its circumference at the waist.  Water multiplies the magnitude of a dead cat by ten.  On the first day out, it was observed that the ship was much strained.  She was three feet wider than usual and as much as ten feet shorter.  The convexity of her deck was visibly augmented fore and aft, but she turned up at both ends.  Her rudder was clean out of water and she would answer the helm only when running directly against a strong breeze:  the rudder, when perverted to one side, would rub against the wind and slew her around; and then she wouldn’t steer any more.  Owing to the curvature of the keel, the masts came