childish pleasure in the presence of. a fellow creature. But at my last words he perked up into a kind of startled slyness.
"If ever you get aboard again, says you?" he repeated. "Why, now, who's to hinder you?"
"Not you, I know," was my reply.
"And right you was," he cried. 'Now you—what do you call yourself, mate?"'
"Jim," I told him.
"Jim, Jim," says he, quite pleased, apparently.
"Well, now, Jim, I've lived that rough as you'd be ashamed to hear of. Now, for instance, you wouldn't think I had had a pious mother—to look at me?" he asked.
"Why, no, not in particular," I answered.
"Ah, well," said he, "but I had—remarkable pious. And I was a civil, pious boy, and could rattle off my catechism that fast as you couldn't tell one word from another. And here's what it come to, Jim, and it begun with chuck-farthen1 on the blessed gravestones! That's what it begun with, but it went further'n that, and so my mother told me, and predicked the whole, she did, the pious woman. But it were Providence that put me here. I've thought it all out in this here lonely island and I'm back on piety. You can't catch me tasting rum so much, but just a thimbleful for luck, of course, the first chance I have. I'm bound I'll be good, and I see the way to. And, Jim'—looking all round him and lowering his voice to a whisper—"I'm rich."
I now felt sure that the poor fellow had gone crazy
