“Pepper,” I replied, solemnly, “don’t ask me.  All is not well here”—­touching my breast mysteriously.  If I had touched my head instead, I should have been nearer the mark.

Pepper stared at me.

“Earthly happiness,” I continued, “is a delusion and a snare.  You will never be happy, Pepper, until you are a cherub.”

Pepper, by the by, would have made an excellent cherub, he was so chubby.  Having delivered myself of these gloomy remarks, I arose languidly from the grass and moved away, leaving Pepper staring after me in mute astonishment.  I was Hamlet and Werter and the late Lord Byron all in one.

You will ask what my purpose was in cultivating this factitious despondency.  None whatever.  Blighted beings never have any purpose in life excepting to be as blighted as possible.

Of course my present line of business could not long escape the eye of Captain Nutter.  I don’t know if the Captain suspected my attachment for Miss Glentworth.  He never alluded to it; but he watched me.  Miss Abigail watched me, Kitty Collins watched me, and Sailor Ben watched me.

“I can’t make out his signals,” I overheard the Admiral remark to my grandfather one day.  “I hope he ain’t got no kind of sickness aboard.”

There was something singularly agreeable in being an object of so great interest.  Sometimes I had all I could do to preserve my dejected aspect, it was so pleasant to be miserable.  I incline to the opinion that people who are melancholy without any particular reason, such as poets, artists, and young musicians with long hair, have rather an enviable time of it.  In a quiet way I never enjoyed myself better in my life than when I was a Blighted Being.

Chapter Twenty—­I Prove Myself To Be the Grandson of My Grandfather

It was not possible for a boy of my temperament to be a blighted being longer than three consecutive weeks.

I was gradually emerging from my self-imposed cloud when events took place that greatly assisted in restoring me to a more natural frame of mind.  I awoke from an imaginary trouble to face a real one.

I suppose you don’t know what a financial crisis is?  I will give you an illustration.

You are deeply in debt—­say to the amount of a quarter of a dollar—­to the little knicknack shop round the corner, where they sell picture-papers, spruce-gum, needles, and Malaga raisins.  A boy owes you a quarter of a dollar, which he promises to pay at a certain time.  You are depending on this quarter to settle accounts with the small shop-keeper.  The time arrives—­and the quarter doesn’t.  That’s a financial crisis, in one sense—­twenty-five senses, if I may say so.

When this same thing happens, on a grander scale, in the mercantile world, it produces what is called a panic.  One man’s inability to pay his debts ruins another man, who, in turn, ruins someone else, and so on, until failure after failure makes even the richest capitalists tremble.  Public confidence is suspended, and the smaller fry of merchants are knocked over like tenpins.