exceedingly useful, as it would save the necessity of fishing a new head
to the one which still stood in the packet. He then went aside with his
two ambassadors, with a view to give his instructions.

Mr. Dodge had no sooner found himself safe in the launch than he felt his
courage revive, and with his courage, his ingenuity, self-love and
assurance. While in the water, a meeker man there was not on earth; he had
even some doubts as to the truth of all his favourite notions of liberty
and equality, for men think fast in danger, and there was an instant when
he might have been easily persuaded to acknowledge himself a demagogue and
a hypocrite in his ordinary practices; one whose chief motive was self,
and whose besetting passions were envy, distrust and malice; or, in other
words, very much the creature he was. Shame came next, and he eagerly
sought an excuse for the want of manliness he had betrayed; but, passing
over the language he had held in the launch, and the means Mr. Leach found
to persuade him to land again, we shall give his apology in his own words,
as he now somewhat hurriedly delivered it, to Captain Truck, in his
own person.

"I must have misunderstood your arrangement, captain," he said; "for
somehow, though _how_ I do not exactly know--but _somehow_ the alarm of
the Arabs was no sooner given than I felt as if I _ought_ to be in the
launch to be at my post; but I suppose it was because I knew that the
sails and spars that brought us here are mostly there, and that this was
the spot to be most resolutely defended. I _do_ think, if they had waded
off to us, I should have fought like a tiger!"

"No doubt you would, my dear sir, and like a wild cat too! We all make
mistakes in judgment, in war, and in politics, and no fact is better
known than that the best soldiers in the end are they who give a little