The captain uplifted his arm, ejaculating solemnly, ‘By!’ and faltered.  ‘You were going to swear!’ said Temple, with savage disdain.

‘By the blessing of Omnipotence!  I’ll save a pair o’ pups from turning wolves.  And I’m a weak mortal man, that ‘s too true.’

‘He was going to swear,’ Temple muttered to me.

I considered the detection of Captain Welsh’s hypocrisy unnecessary, almost a condescension toward familiarity; but the ire in my bosom was boiling so that I found it impossible to roll out the flood of eloquence with which I was big.  Soon after, I was trying to bribe the man with all my money and my watch.

‘Who gave you that watch?’ said he.

‘Downright Church catechism!’ muttered Temple.

‘My grandfather,’ said I.

The captain’s head went like a mechanical hammer, to express something indescribable.

‘My grandfather,’ I continued, ’will pay you handsomely for any service you do to me and my friend.’

‘Now, that’s not far off forgoing,’ said the captain, in a tone as much as to say we were bad all over.

I saw the waters slide by his cabin-windows.  My desolation, my humiliation, my chained fury, tumbled together.  Out it came—­

’Captain, do behave to us like a gentleman, and you shall never repent it.  Our relatives will be miserable about us.  They—­captain!—­they don’t know where we are.  We haven’t even a change of clothes.  Of course we know we’re at your mercy, but do behave like an honest man.  You shall be paid or not, just as you please, for putting us on shore, but we shall be eternally grateful to you.  Of course you mean kindly to us; we see that—­’

‘I thank the Lord for it!’ he interposed.

’Only you really are under a delusion.  It ’s extraordinary.  You can’t be quite in your right senses about us; you must be—­I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully-what we call on shore, cracked about us. . . .

‘Doddered, don’t they say in one of the shires?’ he remarked.

Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I appealed to his manliness.  Why should he take advantage of a couple of boys?  I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings:  What misery were not our friends suffering now. (’Ay, a bucketful now saves an ocean in time to come!’ he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more pathetic dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.

‘Is that Latin or Greek?’ he asked.

I would not reply to the cold-blooded question.  He said the New Testament was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could read it in the original.

‘Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship?’ said Temple, an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to the point than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thought so; however, I took it up:—­

’How can we be graduating for our sphere in life, Captain Welsh, on board your vessel?  Tell us that.’