He might be right, still our mien was evil in reciting the lessons from Scripture; and though Captain Welsh had intelligence we could not draw into it the how and the why of the indignity we experienced.  We had rather he had been a savage captain, to have braced our spirits to sturdy resistance, instead of a mild, good-humoured man of kind intentions, who lent us his linen to wear, fed us at his table, and taxed our most gentlemanly feelings to find excuses for him.  Our way of revenging ourselves becomingly was to laud the heroes of antiquity, as if they had possession of our souls and touched the fountain of worship.  Whenever Captain Welsh exclaimed, ‘Well done,’ or the equivalent, ’That ’s an idea,’ we referred him to Plutarch for our great exemplar.  It was Alcibiades gracefully consuming his black broth that won the captain’s thanks for theological acuteness, or the young Telemachus suiting his temper to the dolphin’s moods, since he must somehow get on shore on the dolphin’s back.  Captain Welsh could not perceive in Temple the personifier of Alcibiades, nor Telemachus in me; but he was aware of an obstinate obstruction behind our compliance.  This he called the devil coiled like a snake in its winter sleep.  He hurled texts at it openly, or slyly dropped a particularly heavy one, in the hope of surprising it with a death-blow.  We beheld him poring over his Bible for texts that should be sovereign medicines for us, deadly for the devil within us.  Consequently, we were on the defensive:  bits of Cicero, bits of Seneca, soundly and nobly moral, did service on behalf of Paganism; we remembered them certainly almost as if an imp had brought them from afar.  Nor had we any desire to be in opposition to the cause he supported.  What we were opposed to was the dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man, who had his one specific for everything, and saw mortal sickness in all other remedies or recreations.  Temple said to him,

’If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to tell me Greek and Latin authors are bad for me, I should listen to his remarks, because he ’s a scholar:  he knows the languages and knows what they contain.’

Captain Welsh replied,

‘If the Archbishop o’ Canterbury sailed the sea, and lived in Foul Alley, Waterside, when on shore, and so felt what it is to toss on top of the waves o’ perdition, he’d understand the value of a big, clean, well-manned, well-provisioned ship, instead o’ your galliots wi’ gaudy sails, your barges that can’t rise to a sea, your yachts that run to port like mother’s pets at first pipe o’ the storm, your trim-built wherries.’

‘So you’d have only one sort of vessel afloat!’ said I.  ’There’s the difference of a man who’s a scholar.’

‘I’d have,’ said the captain, ’every lad like you, my lad, trained in the big ship, and he wouldn’t capsize, and be found betrayed by his light timbers as I found you.  Serve your apprenticeship in the Lord’s three-decker; then to command what you may.’