to tell the truth, I shouldn't have been sorry to catch him napping for once, only to show he was like men in common. I walked aft by the weather side of the large mainsail, accordingly, till I saw him leaning with his head over the lee-bulwark, and heard him again, as I thought, apparently speaking to some one down the schooner's side; upon which I stepped across. Jones's back was to me as I looked over too; but owing to what he was busy with, I suppose, and the wash of the water, which was louder there than inboard, while you heard the plash from her bows every time she forged, he evidently didn't hear me. You may fancy my wonder to find he was reading loud out to himself from the other of the Frenchman's volumes, which I had no doubt left in the dining-cabin--the book open in both hands--he giving it forth in long staves, with a break between--and regular Greek it was, too: you'd have thought he timed them to the plash alongside; and I must say, as every string of long-tailed words flowed together like one, in Jones's deep voice, and the swell rose once or twice with its foam-bells near his very hands, I almost fancied I made a meaning of them--each like a wave, as it were, sweeping to a crest, and breaking. The gusto the man showed in it you can't conceive; and, what was more, I had no doubt he understood the sense of it, for all of a sudden, after twenty staves or so of the kind, he stopped.[8] "There!" said he, "there, old Homer--women, wine, and adventure--what could the devil ask more, blind old prater, with a sound in you like the sea? Ay, wash, wash, wash away, lying old blue-water, you cant wash _it_ out--and wine--no, not the strongest rum in Cape Town--can wash _you_ out!" With that Jones laid his head on his arms, with the book still in one hand, muttering to himself, and I listened in spite of me. "Still it rouses the old times in me!" said he. "Here comes this book across me, too. Ay, ay, and the Rector fancied, sitting teaching me Greek out of old wild Homer all week day--and--and his girl slipping out and in--'twould do to don the cassock of a Sunday and preach out of the pulpit against the world, the devil, and the flesh--then warn me against the sea--ha!" The laugh that came from him at that moment was more like a dog than a human being; but on he went muttering "Women, wine, and adventure, said ye, old Greek, and a goddess too; still he _was_ a good old man the Rector--no guile nor evil in him, with his books in the cases yonder, and the church-spire seen through the window over the garden, and his wife with--ah, the less of that. 'Twas in me, though, and all the blood--and in _her_ dark eyes, too, Mary, though she was! Damnation!" he broke out again, after a bit, as if he'd been arguing it with something under the side, "I didn't take her the first time I came home--nor the second--but--but--ay, I came _back_! Oh that parting-stile, in sight of the sea--and that packet-ship--but oh God! that night, that