Chapter 13

A MAN-OF-WAR HERMIT IN A MOB.

The allusion to the poet Lemsford in a previous chapter, leads me
to speak of our mutual friends, Nord and Williams, who, with
Lemsford himself, Jack Chase, and my comrades of the main-top,
comprised almost the only persons with whom I unreservedly
consorted while on board the frigate. For I had not been long on
board ere I found that it would not do to be intimate with
everybody. An indiscriminate intimacy with all hands leads to
sundry annoyances and scrapes, too often ending with a dozen at
the gang-way. Though I was above a year in the frigate, there
were scores of men who to the last remained perfect strangers to
me, whose very names I did not know, and whom I would hardly be
able to recognise now should I happen to meet them in the streets.

In the dog-watches at sea, during the early part of the evening,
the main-deck is generally filled with crowds of pedestrians,
promenading up and down past the guns, like people taking the air
in Broadway. At such times, it is curious to see the men nodding
to each other's recognitions (they might not have seen each other
for a week); exchanging a pleasant word with a friend; making a
hurried appointment to meet him somewhere aloft on the morrow, or
passing group after group without deigning the slightest
salutation. Indeed, I was not at all singular in having but
comparatively few acquaintances on board, though certainly
carrying my fastidiousness to an unusual extent.

My friend Nord was a somewhat remarkable character; and if
mystery includes romance, he certainly was a very romantic one.
Before seeking an introduction to him through Lemsford, I had
often marked his tall, spare, upright figure stalking like Don
Quixote among the pigmies of the Afterguard, to which he
belonged. At first I found him exceedingly reserved and taciturn;
his saturnine brow wore a scowl; he was almost repelling in his
demeanour. In a word, he seemed desirous of hinting, that his
list of man-of war friends was already made up, complete, and
full; and there was no room for more. But observing that the only
man he ever consorted with was Lemsford, I had too much
magnanimity, by going off in a pique at his coldness, to let him
lose forever the chance of making so capital an acquaintance as
myself. Besides, I saw it in his eye, that the man had been a
reader of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he
seized the right meaning of Montaigne. I saw that he was an
earnest thinker; I more than suspected that he had been bolted in
the mill of adversity. For all these things, my heart yearned
toward him; I determined to know him.

At last I succeeded; it was during a profoundly quiet midnight
watch, when I perceived