"My name's Hoskins, but you can just call me Captain Jack.

I'm so used to it that I don't kind of answer to the other.
Well, now, Miss Bessemer, this here's the surf-boat; she's self-rightin', self-bailin', she can't capsize, and if I was to tell you how many thousands of dollars she cost, you wouldn't believe me." Condy and Blix spent a delightful half-hour in the boat-house while Captain Jack explained and illustrated, and told them anecdotes of wrecks, escapes, and rescues till they held their breaths like ten-year-olds.
It did not take Condy long to know that he had discovered what the story-teller so often tells of but so seldom finds, and what, for want of a better name, he elects to call "a character." Captain Jack had been everywhere, had seen everything, and had done most of the things worth doing, including a great many things that he had far better have left undone.

But on this latter point the Captain seemed to be innocently and completely devoid of a moral sense of right and wrong.

It was quite evident that he saw no matter for conscience in the smuggling of Chinamen across the Canadian border at thirty dollars a head--a venture in which he had had the assistance of the prodigal son of an American divine of international renown.

The trade to Peruvian insurgents of condemned rifles was to be regretted only because the ring manipulating it was broken up.