54 ZIFJS ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

and seedy and fragrant with gin 7 What was it to me that his
grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void
of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in
his conversation? He was a wronged man, a man who had seen
trouble, and that was enough for me. As he mellowed into his
plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I
cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was the son of an English
nobleman—either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember
which, but believed was both ; his father, the nobleman, loved him,
but his mother hated him from the cradle \ and so while he was still
a little boy he was sent to c one of them old, ancient colleges'—he
couldn't remember which ; and by and by his father died and his
mother seized the property and ' shook J him as he phrased it. After
his mother shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was
acquainted used their influence to get him the position of ' loblolly-
boy in. a ship;' and from that point my watchman threw off all tram-
mels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that
bristled all along with incredible adventures ; a narrative that was so
reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes
and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat
speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.

It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low,
vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untravelled
native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature
and appropriated its marvels, until in. time he had woven odds and
ends of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledg-
lings like me, until he had come to believe it himself.