upon honest Joe's mind the impression that it must be fabulously rich, and altogether the kind of thing to obtain possession of which men would hesitate at no crime, however monstrous. And, having had experience of one attempt to gain possession of it by means of treachery, was it not natural that the simple fellow, discovering, or believing that he had discovered, something in the nature of a secret understanding among his shipmates, should at once leap to the conclusion that it was nothing less than a second attempt upon the treasure that was being planned? As to the cook's inquiry whether Joe would not rather be a rich man than be obliged to follow the sea for the remainder of his life, I thought nothing of that; sailors--like everybody else--are possessed of a rooted conviction that wealth is the panacea of all evils. By the time that I had reached this point in my mental argument it was eight bells, and, Forbes coming on deck to relieve me, I went to my cabin more than half convinced that Joe had, after all, discovered a mare's nest; and having thus argued myself into a more comfortable frame of mind, I lay down and slept soundly until I was called by the steward at my usual hour of rising. I will do Joe the justice to say that, having settled in his mind the part that he would play in the drama that he believed was evolving itself on board the barque, he thenceforth played it to the life, and with a skill so consummate as to deceive the most suspicious. He assumed the role of a man who, if let alone, would be willing enough to do his duty honestly, and to the best of his ability, but who could not and would not tolerate the smallest measure of injustice. And he gave himself all the airs of an aggrieved person--of one who has been harshly treated for a trivial fault; his whole manner was the very impersonation of sullen resentment, and the careless, slovenly way in which he performed his duties was a constant source of provocation to me, even though I knew--or thought I knew--that it was all assumed. So exasperating was he that sometimes I even doubted whether his behaviour really was assumption--whether, after all, I had not been deceived in the man; whether it was not rather his former good behaviour that was assumed, while his present delinquencies were the result of an outbreak of irrepressible evil in him. There were even times when I asked myself whether he might not be a ringleader in the very plot he professed to be so anxious to discover, and whether his anxiety to enlighten me might not be assumed for the purpose of blinding and misleading me the more effectually. Never in all my life had I witnessed so thorough and radical a change in any one as seemed to have come over Joe Martin. But a quiet word or two with him, or a glance into his honest eyes when no one was near enough at hand to read their expression, always sufficed to reassure me as to his absolute fidelity. Since it was possible for him