So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words.

I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere.

His interference, in that particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent.

It will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days.

He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too.