“Don’t wonder,” returns the sailor.  “It’s a great State, this South Carolina.  It seems swarming with poor and powerless folks.  Everybody has power to put everybody in jail, where the State gives a body two dog’s-hair and rope-yarn blankets to lay upon, and grants the sheriff, Mr. Hardscrable, full license to starve us, and put the thirty cents a day it provides for our living into his breeches pockets.  Say what you will about it, old fellow, it’s a brief way of doing a little profit in the business of starvation.  I don’t say this with any ill-will to the State that regards its powerless and destitute with such criminal contempt-I don’t.”  And he brings water, gets Tom upon his feet, forces him into a clean shirt, and regards him in the light of a child whose reformation he is determined on perfecting.  He sees that in the fallen man which implies a hope of ultimate usefulness, notwithstanding the sullen silence, the gloomy frown on his knitted brow, and the general air of despair that pervades the external man.

“There!” he exclaims, having improved the personal of the inebriate, and folding his arms as he steps back apace to have a better view of his pupil—­“now, don’t think of being triced up in this dreary vault.  Be cheerful, brace up your resolution-never let the devil think you know he is trying to put the last seal on your fate-never!” Having slipped the black kerchief from his own neck, he secures it about Tom’s, adjusts the shark’s bone at the throat, and mounts the braid hat upon his head with a hearty blow on the crown.  “Look at yourself!  They’d mistake you for a captain of the foretop,” he pursues, and good-naturedly he lays his broad, browned hands upon Tom’s shoulders, and forces him up to a triangular bit of glass secured with three tacks to the wall.

Tom’s hands wander down his sides as he contemplates himself in the glass, saying:  “I look a shade up, I reckon!  And I feel-I have to thank you for it, Spunyarn-something different all over me.  God bless you!  I won’t forget you.  But I’m hungry; that’s all that ails me now.

“I may thank my mother—­”

“Thank yourself, Tom,” interposes the sailor.

“For all this.  She has driven me to this; yes, she has made my soul dead with despair!” And he bursts into a wild, fierce laugh.  A moment’s pause, and he says, in a subdued voice, “I’m a slave, a fool, a wanderer in search of his own distress.”

The kind-hearted sailor seats his pupil upon a board bench, and proceeds down stairs, where, with the bribe of a glass of whiskey, he induces the negro cook to prepare for Tom a bowl of coffee and a biscuit.  In truth, we must confess, that Spunyarn was so exceedingly liberal of his friendship that he would at times appropriate to himself the personal effects of his neighbors.  But we must do him justice by saying that this was only when a friend in need claimed his attention.  And this generous propensity he the more frequently