Looking into his eyes, you seemed to
see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he
had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose
life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a
tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and
fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times
affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the
rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep
natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did
therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of
superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring,
somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and
inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the
welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories
of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from
the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to
those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain
the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more
perilous vicissitudes of the fishery.
Pages:
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233