He snubbed my advances at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him.
So he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation.

He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice.

He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking about himself.
He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week--or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I.But I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously.

What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin?
What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation?
He was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me.

As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.
He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to 'one of them old, ancient colleges'-- he couldn't remember which; and by and by his father died and his mother seized the property and 'shook' him as he phrased it.