“You must figure to yourselves, gentlemen, a long-sparred, well-built, Spanish-looking personage, dressed in a blue frock-coat, and spotless drilling pantaloons, and a sombrero as big round as the capstan-head, shading his dark face—the strip of crape round his hat fixing your eye at once, in connection with the ensign at half-mast, until you found that, besides losing a boat’s crew on the day we saw her in the Gulf, his wife, who had made the voyage with him, had slipped over the stern one night in a calm, and been drowned, in spite of every effort to save her. The man’s features, though somewhat roughened by continual exposure, and blackened by the sun, were as regular as if cut out of stone by some master hand, from the broad brow and aquiline nose, to the square jaw and finely modelled chin, fringed by a beard as glossy and wavy as our first captain’s of the maintop. Every thing about him contrasted oddly enough with his ragged and slovenly crew, and the patched and greasy canvas over his head, until you would almost have sworn, from his mustache, the eye-glass at his button-hole, and the narrow strip of black ribbon, which fell across the snowy mouth of his watch-fob, that he was some whimsical Monsieur on his travels in the East. There was a courteous ease in his address, and a silver twang in his voice, which indicated, rather unpleasantly, that in spite of the bit of crape and the mourning flag, Captain Catherton had banished black care from his end of the ship. Somehow or other, I felt, after the first ten minutes’ interview, that there was a lurking devil behind his smile, sweet as it was, and, with all his civil chaff, it was precious little he would have done to serve me in my wish to reach home, had he not chanced to want a mate to suit his purposes, in place of the man that was lost in the boat. “As soon as he discovered that I had commanded the grab, he at once pressed me to take the chief officer’s berth, remarking of the other five, that he would hardly trust them in charge of the deck, with the cargo he had under hatches. “To tell the truth, I was glad of the chance at the time; for, besides that the place was too hot for a Ghebir—the thermometer standing at midnight at 110° on the forecastle of the grab, then lying off the mouth of the passage between Muscat Island and the main land—I was anxious to leave the coast before a conspiracy, which I knew was forming to dethrone the Sultan, should explode. The cholera, too, was sweeping off the Arabs like flies, and in the very thick of it I had my life twice attempted on shore, for naught that I could conjecture, except that I had peremptorily refused to join the plot. So, as you may suppose, thinking to be on the open seas in a few days, I stepped into the mate’s place at once.