expression of grave surprise would pass over his rugged features. He was
reading "Pelham." The popularity of Bulwer Lytton in the forecastles of
Southern-going ships is a wonderful and bizarre phenomenon. What ideas
do his polished and so curiously insincere sentences awaken in the
simple minds of the big children who people those dark and wandering
places of the earth? What meaning can their rough, inexperienced souls
find in the elegant verbiage of his pages? What excitement?--what
forgetfulness?--what appeasement? Mystery! Is it the fascination of
the incomprehensible?--is it the charm of the impossible? Or are those
beings who exist beyond the pale of life stirred by his tales as by an
enigmatical disclosure of a resplendent world that exists within the
frontier of infamy and filth, within that border of dirt and hunger, of
misery and dissipation, that comes down on all sides to the water's edge
of the incorruptible ocean, and is the only thing they know of life, the
only thing they see of surrounding land--those life-long prisoners of
the sea? Mystery! Singleton, who had sailed to the southward since the
age of twelve, who in the last forty-five years had lived (as we had
calculated from his papers) no more than forty months ashore--old
Singleton, who boasted, with the mild composure of long years well
spent, that generally from the day he was paid off from one ship
till the day he shipped in another he seldom was in a condition to
distinguish daylight--old Singleton sat unmoved in the clash of voices
and cries, spelling through "Pelham" with slow labour, and lost in an
absorption profound enough to resemble a trance. He breathed regularly.
Every time he turned the book in his enormous and blackened hands the
muscles of his big white arms rolled slightly under the smooth skin.
Hidden by the white moustache, his lips, stained with tobacco-juice that
trickled down the long beard, moved in inward whisper. His bleared eyes
gazed fixedly from behind the glitter of black-rimmed glasses. Opposite
to him, and on a level with his face, the ship's cat sat on the barrel