The desire of Captain Scruggs for wishing to appear that he knows everything, especially in the presence of the mate, is still very remarkable. Sometimes it is amusing, but more often extremely annoying. Frequently, when I tell him something that he has never heard of before, he will nod his head slightly, and, with an alteration of my own words, repeat the sentence aggressively and dogmatically, as though it came directly from him, and he was giving us the information. The mate is completely deceived, and always looks admiringly toward him, simultaneously winking and leering atrociously. Moreover, Captain Scruggs is a man whom you cannot possibly surprise by any statement; and he is always unmoved in the face of the most unusual occurrences. As an example, we found, one morning, having taken the precaution of glancing into the pitcher, that the syrup contained a quantity of foreign substances which floated about in it. “There seems to be a number of curious things in the syrup,” I humbly ventured; “looks like long-cut tobacco.” Disturbed? Indeed, no. He only clutched the pitcher from me, peered ferociously into it, and growled, “Steward, see if you can’t get this dust out with a knife.” The skipper is likewise completely destitute of imagination. Shortly after we sailed I started to read an extract to him (I was bold in those days) from a collection of excellent sea stories called “The Port of Missing Ships,” in which mention is made of a mate who was so zealous that he “tried to see how near he could come to standing in two places at the same time without splitting himself.” Here I paused and glanced with a smile at the old man. But, with a face as expressionless as a tadpole’s, he asked, “Isn’t that a little overdrawn?” The mate rises to the most sublime heights of his absurdities when he observes at dinner, as he frequently does, with a smirk perfectly diabolical, “Hi knows the secrets of hall the codfish haristocracy of San Francisco. My old woman used to work in the Wite ’Ouse” (_i.e._, that city’s branch of the Parisian Maison Blanc) “as a fitter; and be gar’s sakes, sir, the things wot I’ve ’eerd is hawful.” He also makes use of extraordinary syncopations in conversation. For example, should my wife ask him a question about the weather, he always says “Sam?” which, being done into English, signifies, “What say, ma’am?”