“No; that is proved. The instincts of his old life, had he been a sailor, would have kept up his courage without respect of his memory. But let us bear in mind that his nervousness is the result of the terrible experience he has gone through. If illness--if fever, for instance--will rob us of our nerves, how much more the unspeakable agony of hunger and thirst, and the deadly, hopeless captivity and exposure in an open boat for days, and maybe for weeks! It would drive me mad!” “Ay, that is verra true. Understand me, I am not speaking disrespectfully of the puir soul. I would only bid you obsairve by his fear that he canna hae been a tarry-breeks. The auld speerit would live in spite o’ his nerves, and would have risen to the cries of the men and the bocking o’ the water. That’s my opeenion.” Thus we may learn how some opinions, delivered in sound earnest, are manufactured. Not a tarry-breeks! There had never sailed out of any port in Christendom a finer, a more courageous sailor than Holdsworth. What would Captain Duff have thought of his “opeenion,” had he been told that that same halting, crippled figure, who had hastened to his cabin with movements full of fear, had been, only a month before, an upright, handsome man, with an eye full of light and spirit, with nerves and skill equal to occasions which would have overwhelmed the honest Scotch skipper and left him nowhere, with a heart as gentle as a maiden’s and manly as Nelson’s; always foremost in the moment of danger, with the voice of a trumpet to deliver unerring commands; a leader in measures of which the peril made the stoutest-hearted tremble and stand still; scaling the dizzy heights of whirling masts and spars, to whose summits he might have beckoned in vain to those very seamen of the “Jessie Maxwell,” whose movements, now in the weakness of his crushed and broken life, he dared not even watch? Of all sights, that of the strong and lion-hearted man, smitten down by sickness, by misery, by misfortune to the feebleness of an infant, to the timidity of a girl, is surely the most affecting. Such a man I have seen--a sailor--entering the forecastle full of the courage that makes heroes of men, and leaving it, after two months of confinement, with nerves and health so shattered, that he has not dared to approach the bulwarks of the ship for fear of falling overboard! Give the full measure of your pity, kind reader, to such as these. There is no form of human suffering whose pathos is more unqualified.