and seedy and fragrant with gin? What was it to me that his grammar was
bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it
was an element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation? He
was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for
me. As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the
lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was the
son of an English nobleman--either an earl or an alderman, he could not
remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved
him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still
a little boy he was sent to 'one of them old, ancient colleges'--he
couldn't remember which; and by and by his father died and his mother
seized the property and 'shook' him as he phrased it. After his mother
shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used
their influence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and
from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality
and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with
incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed
and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and
unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying,
shuddering, wondering, worshipping.

It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar,
ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the
wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated
its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into
this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he
had come to believe it himself.