recess between the cabin doors, and thence from the starboard ones up to the chart-rack and the broad transom, where the two models, one of a whale-ship, the other of a first-rate, both made of a sperm whale’s jaw—guns, boats, spars, and even the miniature brail-blocks, all fashioned out of glistening white bone, were resting on their mimic ways. Of course I saw nothing there to account for the impression, faint as it grew again while I gazed, and half deeming it the delusive trace of some forgotten likeness, or of something which I had read of or dreamed, I turned my eyes again upon Captain Catherton. “‘Mr. Miller,’ said the man, as calmly as if he were sitting at home, it might be, in his nursery, his wife within reach of a whisper, and something in the subdued, moist look of his eyes in devilish accordance with the drowsy quiet of a domestic scene, ‘we are not all as philosophic as Cato—nor as vile as the man made immortal in infamy by Horace—_non omnibus dormis_—you remember the satires.’ “As I stared again at this, a forlorn ghost of a smile flitted over his face, and with his next breath the mystery of the thing vanished. I have often wondered since what it was that kept me fixed to my seat like stone; perhaps it was the reflection that my own accursed folly had been the wreck of us three—him, the wretch—myself, and _her_—perhaps it was the awful suddenness of the shock which stunned me like a heavy blow; I cannot say; but stifling the groan which rose to my lips as the horrible truth flashed upon me, while the very air seemed to thicken before my gaze, and his words to come with terrible distinctness through the gloom, I sat still on my seat and heard him out. “‘I was born,’ he said, ‘at the village of ——, a few miles from Philadelphia, and abandoned my home, like a fledged petrel, as soon as I could comprehend the map of the world with its thousand ports and its endless stretch of sea. It is a strange thing, Mr. Miller, this young fancy of ours for being blown about by the wild winds, and rocked out of a life of ease by the cunning waves of the deep. To my mind there was once nothing so joyous in life as the roar of the gale at its height, when you slid from the top of a sea to the trough—the dripping dash of a head sea on the prow—or the rush of cleft waters astern, as you sat conning the chart.’ Little did that careful old pedagogue dream, as, day after day he chuckled over my progress in this department of knowledge, what restless longings disturbed the breast of his pupil, like the instinct of the unfledged albatross when it hears the sound of the sea from its nest on some sheltering cliff.