about the simplest, noblest, and most unfortunate
of all my personages. Insanity is as various
as eccentricity; I have spared the kind-hearted
reader some of David's vagaries; however, when
we parted with him, he had settled into that
strange phase of lunacy, in which the distant past
seems nearly obliterated, and memory exists, but
revolves in a narrow round of things present:
this was accompanied with a positive illusion—
to wit, a fixed idea that he was an able seaman:
and, as usual, what mental power he retained
came out strongest in support of this idea. All
this was marked by a bodily agility somewhat
more than natural in a man of his age. Owing
to the wind astern, he was enabled to run into
Portsmouth before the steam-tug came up with
him: and he did run into port, not because he
feared pursuit, but because he was desperately
hungry; and he had no suicidal tendencies whatever.

He made for a public-house, and called for
some bread and cheese and beer; they were
supplied, and then lo! he had no money to pay for
them. "I'll owe you till I come back from sea,
my bo," said he coolly. On this the landlord
collared him, and David shook him off into the
road, much as a terrier throws a rat from him;
then there was a row, and a naval officer, who
was cruising about for hands, came up and heard
it. There was nothing at all unseamanlike in
David's conduct, and the gentleman took a
favourable view of it, and paid the small demand;
but not with unleavened motives; he was the
second lieutenant of H.M. Frigate Vulture;
she had a bad name, thanks to her last captain,
and was short of hands: he took David aside and
asked him would he like to ship on board the
Vulture.

David said yes, and suggested the foretop.
"Oh yes," growled the lieutenant, "you all
want to be there." He then gauged this Jacky
Tar's intellects; asked him inter alia how to
send a frigate's foretop gallant yard down upon
deck: and, to show how seamanship sticks in the
brain when once it gets there, David actually
told him. "You are rather old," said the
lieutenant, "but you are a seaman:" and so took
him on board the Vulture at Spithead, before
Green began to search the town in earnest.
Nobody acts his part better than some demented
persons do: and David made a very tolerable sailor,
notwithstanding his forty-five years: and the
sea did him good within certain limits. Between
him and the past lay some intellectual or cerebral
barrier as impenetrable as the great wall of China:
but on the hither side of that wall his faculties
improved. Of course the crew soon found out
the gap in his poor brain, and called him Soft
Billy, and played on him at first. But by
degrees he won their affection; he was so
wonderfully sweet-tempered: and besides, his mind
being in an abnormal state, he loathed grog, and
gave his allowance to his messmates. One day
he showed an unexpected trait; they were
lying becalmed in southern latitudes, and, time
hanging heavy, each whiled it how he might;
one fiddled, another wrote to his Polly, another
fished for sharks, another whistled for a wind,
scores fell into the form of meditation without
the reality, and one got a piece of yarn and
amused himself killing flies on the bulwark.
Now this shocked poor Billy: he put out his
long arm and intercepted a stroke. "What is
the row?" said the operator.

"You mustn't" said Billy solemnly, looking
into his face with great dreamy eyes.

''You be——," said the other, and lent him a
tap on the cheek with the yarn. Billy did not
seem to mind this; his skin had little sensibility,
owing to his disorder.

Jack recommenced on his flies, and the
bystanders laughed. They always laughed now at
everything Billy said, as Society used to laugh
when the late Theodore Hook asked for the
mustard at dinner; and would have laughed if
he had said, "You see me sad, I have just lost
my poor father."

David stood looking on at the slaughter with
a helpless puzzled air.

At last he seemed to have an idea; he caught
Jack up by the throat and knee, lifted him with
gigantic strength above his head, and was just
going to hurl him shrieking into the sea, when a
dozen strong hands interfered, and saved the
man. Then they were going to bind Billy
hand and foot; but he was discovered to be
perfectly calm; so they remonstrated instead,
and presently Billy's commander-in-chief, a shipboy
called Georgy White, shoved in and asked
him in a shrill haughty voice how he dared do
that. "My dear," said Billy, with great humility
and placidity, "he was killing God's creatures,
no allowance:* so, ye see, to save their lives, I
was obliged."
* Nautical phrase, meaning without stint or limit,
or niggardly admeasurement; as there is of grog.

At this piece of reasoning, and the simplicity
and gentle conviction with which it was delivered,
there was a roar. It subsided, and a doubt arose
whether Billy was altogether in the wrong.

"Well," said one, "I dare say life is sweet to
them little creatures, if they could speak their
minds."

"I've known a ship founder in a fair breeze
all along of killing 'em," said one old salt.

Finally, several sided with Billy, and intimated
that "it served the lubber right for not listening
to reason." And, indeed, methinks it was lovely
and touching that so divine a ray of goodness
and superior reason should have shot from his
heart or from Heaven across that poor benighted
brain.

But it must be owned his mode of showing
his humanity was somewhat excessive and
abnormal, and smacked of lunacy. After this,
however, the affection of his messmates was not so
contemptuous.

Now the captain of the Vulture was Billy's
cousin by marriage, Reginald Bazalgette. Twenty