My own life was as pleasant as a seafaring life can very well be. Greaves had much to talk about. He had looked into books. He had traveled widely and observed closely. He was a person of much good nature. In truth, a more genial, informing man I could not have prayed for as a shipmate. Yet I would take notice of a certain haziness on one side of his mind. He loved metaphysical speculations, and would wriggle out of a homely topic to start a religious discussion. I humored him for some time, but religion being one of those subjects that I did not much care to talk about, I soon ceased to argue, and then all the talking was his. He entertained some odd notions for a sailor, believed that every man had a good and bad angel, that when a man died his spirit slept with his dust. “Otherwise,” he asked, “what is to bring the parts together again, inform them with mind, and render the whole sensible of what is happening?” I found that he had a leaning toward the Roman Catholic faith. I asked him if he was married. He answered “No.” I then inquired why Van Laar had threatened to take the bed from under him and his wife. “To vex me,” said he. He would be talking of religion and metaphysics, of dreams and a future life, of the state of his soul a million years ago, and of the inhabitants of certain of the stars, when I would be thinking of his ship in the cave and the dollars aboard of her. But as our voyage progressed, as we drove southward toward the Horn, he found little or nothing to say about his ship in the cave. You would have said he was done with the subject. He had so little to say, indeed, that I would wonder at times whether the purpose of this expedition was not slipping out of his memory as a dream, that is vital and brilliant on one’s awaking from it, fades ere nightfall, and is effaced by the vision of another slumber. “It will be a confounded disappointment should it prove false after all,” I would think; for, spite of my misgivings which sometimes I would nourish and sometimes spurn, I, during those tedious days and weeks running into months, I, in many a lonely watch on deck, in many a waking hour in my hammock, had built my little castles in the air, had furnished them handsomely for one of my degree, had gazed at them with fondness as they glittered in the light of my hope. Six thousand pounds! The money was a bigger pile in those days than it is now; to be so easily earned too! Why, in imagination I had bought me a little house, I had married a wife, I was gardening often in mine own little estate, and every quarter I was receiving dividend warrants; and there was good ale in my cellar, and no stint at meal times; and I was a happy young man, in imagination sitting, as I did, on the apex of that pyramid of promised dollars, whence I commanded a boundless prospect for a mariner’s eye. And now if it was all to end in a hoaxing dream! Bless me! While I was on this side of the Horn how I pined for t’other side,