the mean time, Jacobs and some of the men had drawn a bucket of water, which we noticed them tasting. A pannikin full of it was handed along to the quarterdeck, and the taste struck you at once, owing to the want of the well-known briny twang of real blue-water, and instead of that a smack as it were of iron, though it was as clear as crystal. Every one had a trial of it but Jones himself: indeed, he never once looked round, till it had occurred to me to pour the tin of water into a glass and hold it with my hand over it inside the shade of the binnacle, when I thought I made out little specks and sparks shooting and twisting about in it, as if the water had a motion of itself; then it seemed to sink to the bottom, and all was quiet. Just then I looked up and caught Jones' scared restless sort of glance, as if he were uneasy. There was a strange life in that man's brain, I felt, that none could see into; but owing as it plainly was to something far away from the present matter, I knew it was best to let him alone. In fact, his doing as he did showed well enough he meant fair by ourselves. Nothing on earth ever gave me more the notion of a wreck in a man, than the kind of gaze out of Jones' two eyes, when he'd turn to the light and look at you, half keen, half shrinking, like a man that both felt himself above you, and yet, somehow or other, you'd got him under you. I'm blessed if I didn't trust him more because he had been too desperate a character in his deeds beforehand to turn his mind to little ones now, than for anything good in him; being one of those fellows that work their way from one port to another in ships' forecastles, and get drunk ashore, though, all the time, you'd say there wasn't one aboard with them, from the skipper to the chaplain, knew as much or had flown as high some time. Some day at sea the hands are piped round the grating, hats off, and the prayer-book rigged,--down goes "Jack Jones" with a plash and a bubble to his namesake, old "Davy," and you hear no more of him!