In a day when seamen--and no less the naval officer than the merchantman--considered a capacity for picturesque and plentiful profanity a mark of professional aptitude, he was distinguished by refraining from oaths and curses. Mark the words: "Do not swear, Mr. Stacy--in another moment we may all be in eternity--but let us do our duty." Uttered in the heat of action, and in a critical moment, the sentence is as rare as it is beautiful, and it somehow reminds me of the dying words of Nelson in the cockpit of the Victory. He was clean-mouthed and clean-hearted. I do not wish to say that he was immaculate, a saint, or anything of that sort, but there is no man of similar upbringing, who lived in his day, and under such circumstances, whose life appears to be cleaner. There is a total absence of sensuality in his career. In over thirteen hundred letters which have been examined, there is not a coarse or indelicate allusion; no _double entendre_ ever sullies his pages, and the name of no woman is mentioned save in terms of respect. It is probable that his amour with Madame de Telison passed the bounds of Platonic friendship or romantic admiration, and it is possible that they did have a child; but even this is by no means certain, and the conclusion may do him an injustice. When one remembers that from a tender age he was deprived of those gentle restraints imposed by pious and loving family ties, his character is remarkable. I have observed in much experience with men that when the check put upon humanity by the Church, by association with good women, and by keeping in touch with law-abiding society is removed, and men are assembled far from these things in camps or ships, where the principal requirement is a stern obedience to law, and the atmosphere strictly masculine, they are apt to think, say, and do things to which they would never descend under ordinary circumstances. Jones had been a sailor--an apprentice boy at that--at twelve years of age; for sixteen years thereafter he had never been off blue water for more than a few months. Five years of that time he had been on a slaver, beginning as third mate at sixteen and quitting as chief mate at twenty-one, and of all the degrading, brutal influences to which humanity could be subjected there was nothing that equaled the horrors of a ship in the slave trade. The tough moral fiber of the Scotsman stood him in good stead here, for the thing which with a boy's indifference he could countenance, he could not endure as a man.