The captain is like one demented. As MacFoy whispered to me this afternoon when the jib-topsail-sheet parted, throwing him into a paroxysm, “If he doesn’t get a fair wind soon he’ll go mad.” In truth, he has been in a passion all day, chassezing up and down the main-deck as though he had a devil. Just before the sheet went he had a spasm of tautening things up, and went braying about with a voice of brass, driving the men like animals before him; he had just ordered the above sheet flattened in when crack it went, and in a few seconds the clew of the sail was in fluttering ribbons, for the wind, though not strong, whipped away the old canvas as though it were a cobweb. The mate caught it too when he came out of his cavern at quarter to twelve to take the sun, and by the time that we sat down to dinner the old man had worked him into a speechless state, so that throughout the meal he sat crushed and silent, with a face like a cigar Indian. These repasts on such occasions are pregnant with gloomy thoughts, stillness reigning as the skipper fiercely gnaws at his dinner, clicking his teeth, while the whole top of his head seems to move as he chews, his temples particularly rotating like the eccentrics of a steam-engine. His head is quite bald, and his face is embellished with such enormous whiskers that his whole head looks like an inverted sea-anemone; and when he is angry, as he was to-day, his black eyes so glitter and snap under such shaggy brows that they seem about to jump out and annihilate you. After dinner, which appeared to increase his ill-humor, being a dyspeptic, he went up to put some new panes of glass into the skylight which the sea had broken. He fussed and fumed around with putty, diamond, and chisel for half an hour, at the end of which time he had one pane nicely adjusted, when it cracked across one corner. This almost prostrated him, and when two other cracks appeared in rapid succession, each calling forth a low, intense “d----,” he simply got up and ran away. Then this amiable man commenced on the mate again, who, of course, began to “bullyrag” the men, and finally brought down young Louis Eckers to his knees with a hard blow in the face with his fist. This was due solely to temper, because he had to repeat an order which Louis didn’t understand on account of his ignorance of English.