The dead days became dreams and visions to my memory when I thought backward and recalled the _Royal Brunswicker_, Captain Spalding, my arrival in the Downs, the gibbet on the sand hills, the press-gang, the long outward passage to the island, and the hopes and fears which came and went when Greaves talked rationally of the dollars, then irrationally of dreams and the like, and so on, and so on. I did pray very eagerly in my heart that he would be spared. Indeed, I loved the man. He had saved my life, he had enriched me, he had proved a generous, cordial, and cheery shipmate and messmate. I say I loved him, and on several occasions, when I was on deck alone, walking out the weary hours of the night watch, did I look up at the stars and ask of God to deliver my friend from the death whose hand was closing upon him. These petitions would I murmur till my eyes were wet. It was hard that he should be called away in the prime of his time, after years of the stern and barren servitude of the sea, at the moment when a noble prize, gained, as I would think, with high adventurous skill, was his. But I never could discover, at this time at all events, that he had the smallest idea he was in a bad way. What was visible to me and the sailors, to the Spanish lady, yes, and to his own dog, himself did not see--at least, by never a word that fell from his lips did he give me to guess he knew he was ill. Sometimes he’d complain of weakness and keep his bed; he’d wonder what had become of his appetite, that was all; he never went further. It was I, mainly, who took sights and kept the ship’s reckoning, who, in fact, navigated the brig, and did the work of her master. Miss Aurora’s sympathies with him were strong at the start--that is, when she saw how ill he was and how his illness was increasing upon him. She’d make efforts to anticipate his wants at table; with her own hands she’d boil chocolate for him in the caboose and bring it to the cabin; she let me understand she wished to nurse him. But whether it was because of simple dislike, or because his poor head, muddling the fine woman whom he had rescued with the speechless Jewess of his dream, excited in him some inscrutable fear or aversion I know not; he would have nothing to say to her, looked away when she spoke, repelled whatever she offered, often shrank when she approached--was so crazily discourteous, in a word, that I was obliged to take the girl aside and, by signs and such words as were now current between us, advise her to keep clear of him.