I overhauled the captain’s wardrobe, and unearthed three hats of different kinds—one of them a wideawake; another, a cap of some kind of skin, very good to keep a night-watch in in dirty weather; and the third, an old-fashioned tarpaulin glazed hat—the sire of the sou’-wester of our own times, though, to be sure, sou’-wester caps, as they were called, were in use at the beginning of the century. This example of head-gear I returned to the locker in which I had found it, but the other two Miss Temple thought she could make serviceable. She tried them on, stealing glances almost coquettish at me as she peered at herself in the looking-glass which I brought from her cabin. There had been a time when nothing, I am persuaded, could have induced her to touch those hats. She would have shrunk from them with the aversion and disgust she had exhibited at Captain Braine’s suggestions about the furnishing of her cabin in the steerage. Assuredly, old ocean was working a mighty change in her character. Life real, stern, uncompromising, was busy with her; and just as Byron says of his shipwrecked people, that the mothers of them would not have known their own sons, so was I assured of my shipmate Louise that if it pleased God we should escape from the perils of this adventure, she would emerge a changed woman in every characteristic that had been displeasing in her before. CHAPTER XXXVI I CONVERSE WITH WETHERLY Not to dwell too long on a detail of insignificance, it will suffice to say that by dint of rummaging the wardrobes of Captain Braine and Mr. Chicken I obtained several useful articles, and Miss Temple went to work to convert them into wearing-apparel for herself, with the help of a pair of scissors which I borrowed from the carpenter, and needles and thread procured from amongst the men by Wetherly. The occupation was useful to her in other ways; it killed the tedious, the insufferably tedious time, and it gave her something to think of, and even something to look forward to, so blank had been the hours. I remember coming out of my cabin after a spell of sleep to take sights shortly before noon, and finding her seated at the table with some flannel or fine blanket stuff before her, at which she was stitching—ripped up and violated vestments of either Braine or Chicken, but brand-new, or she would scarcely have meddled with them. She received me with a smile and a few words, and then went on sewing with an air as of gratification in her that I should have found her at work.