"You were very anxious to give up your mate to the shore people, I
believe?"
He was. To the law. His obscure tenacity on that point had in it
something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it were,
mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should not be suspected
of "countenancing any doings of that sort." Seven-and-thirty virtuous
years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last
fifteen in the Sephora, seemed to have laid him under some pitiless
obligation.
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"And you know," he went on, groping shame-facedly amongst his feelings,
"I did not engage that young fellow. His people had some interest with
my owners. I was in a way forced to take him on. He looked very smart,
very gentlemanly, and all that. But do you know--I never liked him,
somehow. I am a plain man. You see, he wasn't exactly the sort for the
chief mate of a ship like the Sephora."
I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret
sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I, personally, were being given to
understand that I, too, was not the sort that would have done for the
chief mate of a ship like the Sephora. I had no doubt of it in my mind.
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