anew; and it may have cost him a veritable pang when he found that his
little ones did not know him. All the sentiments of the situation were
such as might persuade a lively fancy of the truth of its own
inventions; and as he heard these continually repeated by the
contributor in their search for Mr. Hapford, they must have acquired an
objective force and repute scarcely to be resisted. At the same time,
there were touches of nature throughout Jonathan Tinker's narrative
which could not fail to take the faith of another. The contributor, in
reviewing it, thought it particularly charming that his mariner had not
overdrawn himself, or attempted to paint his character otherwise than as
it probably was; that he had shown his ideas and practices of life to be
those of a second mate, nor more nor less, without the gloss of regret
or the pretences to refinement that might be pleasing to the supposed
philanthropist with whom he had fallen in. Captain Gooding was of course
a true portrait; and there was nothing in Jonathan Tinker's statement of
the relations of a second mate to his superiors and his inferiors which
did not agree perfectly with what the contributor had just read in "Two
Years before the Mast,"--a book which had possibly cast its glamour upon
the adventure. He admired also the just and perfectly characteristic air
of grief in the bereaved husband and father,--those occasional escapes
from the sense of loss into a brief hilarity and forgetfulness, and
those relapses into the hovering gloom, which every one has observed in
this poor, crazy human nature when oppressed by sorrow, and which it
would have been hard to simulate. But, above all, he exulted in that
supreme stroke of the imagination given by the second mate when, at
parting, he said he believed he would go down and sleep on board the
vessel. In view of this, the State's Prison theory almost appeared a
malign and foolish scandal.

Yet even if this theory were correct, was the second mate wholly