, would sit smoking, and thinking of Florence and poor Walter, until they
both seemed to his homely fancy to be dead, and to have passed away into eternal
youth, the beautiful and innocent children of his first remembrance.
    The Captain did not, however, in his musings, neglect his own improvement,
or the mental culture of Rob the Grinder. That young man was generally required
to read out of some book to the Captain, for one hour, every evening; and as the
Captain implicitly believed that all books were true, he accumulated, by this
means, many remarkable facts. On Sunday nights, the Captain always read for
himself, before going to bed, a certain Divine Sermon once delivered on a Mount;
and although he was accustomed to quote the text, without book, after his own
manner, he appeared to read it with as reverent an understanding of its heavenly
spirit, as if he had got it all by heart in Greek, and had been able to write
any number of fierce theological disquisitions on its every phrase.
    Rob the Grinder, whose reverence for the inspired writings, under the
admirable system of the Grinders' School, had been developed by a perpetual
bruising of his intellectual shins against all the proper names of all the
tribes of Judah, and by the monotonous repetition of hard verses, especially by
way of punishment, and by the parading of him at six years old in leather
breeches, three times a Sunday, very high up, in a very hot church, with a great
organ buzzing against his drowsy head, like an exceedingly busy bee - Rob the
Grinder made a mighty show of being edified when the Captain ceased to read, and
generally yawned and nodded while the reading was in progress. The latter fact
being never so much as suspected by the good Captain.
    Captain Cuttle, also, as a man of business, took to keeping books. In these
he entered observations on the weather, and on the currents of the waggons and
other vehicles: which he observed, in that quarter, to set westward in the
morning and during the greater part of the day, and eastward towards the
evening. Two or three stragglers appearing in one week, who »spoke him« - so the
Captain entered it - on the subject of spectacles, and who, without positively
purchasing, said they would look in again, the Captain decided that the business
was improving, and made an entry in the day-book to that effect: the wind then
blowing (which he first recorded) pretty fresh, west and by north; having
changed in the
