my boy, seein' that I don't wear my heart on my coat-sleeve, nor yet on
the point of my nose, for the inspection of all and sundry. Besides, you
can't tell whether it's a bad or a good endin', for it has not ended yet
one way or another. Moreover, what appears bad is often found to be
good, an' what seems good is pretty often uncommon bad."

"You are a walking dictionary of truisms, father! I suppose you mean to
take a philosophical view of the misfortune and make the best of it,"
said Nigel, with what we may style one of his twinkling smiles, for on
nearly all occasions that young man's dark, brown eyes twinkled, in
spite of him, as vigorously as any "little star" that was ever told in
prose or song to do so--and much more expressively, too, because of the
eyebrows of which little stars appear to be destitute.

"No, lad," retorted the captain; "I take a common-sense view--not a
philosophical one; an' when you've bin as long at sea as I have, you'll
call nothin' a misfortune until it's proved to be such. The only
misfortune I have at present is a son who cannot see things in the same
light as his father sees 'em."

"Well, then, according to your own principle that is the reverse of a
misfortune, for if I saw everything in the same light that you do,
you'd have no pleasure in talking to me, you'd have no occasion to
reason me out of error, or convince me of truth. Take the subject of
poetry, now--"

"Luff," said Captain Roy, sternly, to the man at the wheel.

When the man at the wheel had gone through the nautical evolution
involved in "luff," the captain turned to his son and said abruptly--