I considered very seriously whether I should repeat to the captain my brief conversation with Yan Bol--that chat, I mean, which I have related at the end of the last chapter. For my own part I could not comfortably settle my views of Yan Bol, yet I saw nothing to object to in the man. Nothing could I recollect him saying of a kind to excite misgiving. Though he was acting as second mate, he associated with the seamen as one of them, slept and ate with them in their forecastle, and yet had their respect. This I observed and thought well of. He was a bold and hearty seaman--a practical sailor. Of navigation he knew nothing; indeed, he once owned that he could never understand how it happened that the progress of a ship altered time; the reason, he said, had been explained to him on several occasions, but it was all the same--it was a mystery “und it vhas vonderful dot any man vhas born mit brains to understand him.” And yet I could not arrive at any conclusion to satisfy me. “Am I influenced almost unconsciously against him,” thought I, “by his Dutch airs and graces? Am I moved to an inward, secret dislike by a certain freedom of speech and accost, by a sort of familiarity I have noticed among Germans, and thought particularly detestable in Germans?” though I had heretofore found such Dutchmen as I had encountered too stodgy and stolid, too insipid and inexpressive, too torpid in mind and laborious in perception to be readily capable of vexing one by that kind of freedom and easiness of address and bearing which makes you thirsty to kick the beast whose burden it is. No, I could not trace my doubts of Yan Bol to my dislike of his behavior to me. Indeed, I could not trace any doubts at all. And yet I never thought of him quite comfortably. If Greaves’ dollar-ship was no vision of his slumbers, if Greaves’ chests of milled silver were veritably aboard _La Perfecta Casada_ in the cave he had described, then we should be a rich brig when we set sail from the island; we should need an honest crew to carry us safely home. Was Yan Bol honest? If a doubt of him arose he was the one man of the whole ship’s company whom it would be Greaves’ policy to get rid of as soon as possible, because he was the one man of all our little ship’s company the most capable, should he take the trouble to exert himself, of obtaining an ascendancy over his mates, and of directing them for good or ill as he decided. These being my thoughts I resolved to repeat to Greaves the questions which Bol had put to me touching the money in the island ship. He listened to me anxiously and attentively. “I hope that man will not go wrong,” said he, when I had concluded; “I like him.” “He is a good man in the forecastle-sense of the word,” I answered.