"I have worked all sorts of traverses to get hold of this matter, and
never could make any thing of it. It is harder than logarithms. If my
father had been the only one to teach it, I should have thought less about
it, for he was no scholar, and might have been paying it out just in the
way of business; but then my mother believed it, body and soul, and she
was too good a woman to stick long to a course that had not truth to
back it."

"Why not believe it heartily, sir, and let the wheel fly? One gets to the
end of the v'y'ge on this tack as well as on another."

"There is no great difficulty in working up to or even through the passage
of death, Leach, but the great point is to know the port we are to moor in
finally. My mother taught me to pray, and when I was ten I had underrun
all the Commandments, knew the Lord's Creed, and the Apostles' Prayer, and
had made a handsome slant into the Catechism; but, dear me, dear me, it
has all oozed out of me, like the warmth from a Greenlander."

"Folks were better educated in your time, Captain Truck, than they are
now-a-days, by all I can learn."

"No doubt of that in the world. In my time, younkers were taught respect
for their betters, and for age, and their Catechism, and piety, and the
Apostles' Prayer, and all those sort of things. But America has fallen
astern sadly in manners within the last fifty years. I do not flatter
myself with being as good as I was when under my excellent dear mother's
command, but there are worse men in the world, and out of Newgate, too,
than John Truck. Now, in the way of vices, Leach, I never swear."

"Not you, sir; and Mr. Monday _never_ drinks."