CHAPTER XXV

Leaving India

To Mauritius via Madras and Colombo

MARCH 28, '96 at sea.

Our Captain is a handsome Hercules; young, resolute,
manly, and has a huge great splendid head, a satisfaction
to look at. He has this odd peculiarity: he cannot tell the
truth in a plausible way. He is the very opposite of the
austere Scot who sits midway on the table: he cannot tell
a lie in an wnplausible way. When the Captain finishes a
statement, the passengers glance at each other privately,
as who would say—"Do you believe that?" When the Scot
finishes one, the look says—"How strange and interest-
ing." The whole secret is in the matter and method of the
two men. The Captain is a little shy and diffident, and he
states the simplest fact as if he were a little afraid of it,
while the Scot delivers himself of the most atrocious lie
with such an air of stern veracity that one is forced to
believe it although he knows it isn't so. For instance: the
Captain told how he carried home 62 children under seven,
one voyage, nearly all of them bad, ungoverned creatures,
because they had been allowed all their little lives to abuse
and insult the native servants; and how a boy of seven
was shoving a boy of three overboard one day when the
Captain caught the victim by the leg and saved him—
then slapped the persecutor, and straightway got a couple
of stinging slaps himself from the persecutor's mother.
The private comment among the ladies at the table was
"Do you really believe she slapped him?"

Presently the Scot told how he caught a shark down on

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