I had been struck by his manner, and more by his manner than by his speech, when he lectured Wirtz and flung at Antonio, the Spaniard, as you have read in the last chapter. Yet of itself this would not have been a matter to rest very weightily upon my mind, seeing that all along I had considered Greaves as a little, just a little, mad at the root. But soon the incident took significance as being a first lifting of the curtain, so to speak, upon a new and somewhat crazy behavior in my friend. I hoped at first it was the heat that unsettled his nerves and that the Horn would give me back my old, odd, hearty, generous shipmate and messmate. Then I feared that the blow he had dealt himself when he stumbled in the hold of the _Casada_ had been silently and painlessly working bitter mischief in the organ of the liver, or in parts adjacent thereto. If the liver was hurt the strangeness of the man might be accounted for. I have suffered from the liver in my time, and know what it is to have felt mad; I say I have known moments--O God, avert the like of them from me and those I love--when I could scarce restrain myself from breaking windows, kicking at the shins of all who approached me, knocking my head against the wall, yelling with the yell of one who drops in a fit; and all the while my brain was as healthy as the healthiest that ever filled a human skull, and nothing was wanted but a musketry of calomel pills to dislodge the fiend that was jockeying my liver and galloping the whole fabric of my being down the easy descent. It will not be supposed that the change in Greaves was sudden. It uttered itself at capricious intervals, and at the beginning was more visible in the mood than in the man.