The captain sat down again on the foot of the bed, and the young man opened the folded paper with a trembling hand, and spread it on the table.  The ragged paper, evidently creased and torn both before and after being written on, was much blotted and stained, and the ink had faded and run, and many words were wanting.  What the captain and the young fisherman made out together, after much re-reading and much humouring of the folds of the paper, is given on the next page.

The young fisherman had become more and more agitated, as the writing had become clearer to him.  He now left it lying before the captain, over whose shoulder he had been reading it, and dropping into his former seat, leaned forward on the table and laid his face in his hands.

“What, man,” urged the captain, “don’t give in!  Be up and doing like a man!”

“It is selfish, I know,—­but doing what, doing what?” cried the young fisherman, in complete despair, and stamping his sea-boot on the ground.

“Doing what?” returned the captain.  “Something!  I’d go down to the little breakwater below yonder, and take a wrench at one of the salt-rusted iron rings there, and either wrench it up by the roots or wrench my teeth out of my head, sooner than I’d do nothing.  Nothing!” ejaculated the captain.  “Any fool or fainting heart can do that, and nothing can come of nothing,—­which was pretended to be found out, I believe, by one of them Latin critters,” said the captain with the deepest disdain; “as if Adam hadn’t found it out, afore ever he so much as named the beasts!”

Yet the captain saw, in spite of his bold words, that there was some greater reason than he yet understood for the young man’s distress.  And he eyed him with a sympathising curiosity.

“Come, come!” continued the captain, “Speak out.  What is it, boy!”

“You have seen how beautiful she is, sir,” said the young man, looking up for the moment, with a flushed face and rumpled hair.

“Did any man ever say she warn’t beautiful?” retorted the captain.  “If so, go and lick him.”

The young man laughed fretfully in spite of himself, and said—­

“It’s not that, it’s not that.”

“Wa’al, then, what is it?” said the captain in a more soothing tone.

The young fisherman mournfully composed himself to tell the captain what it was, and began:  “We were to have been married next Monday week—­”

“Were to have been!” interrupted Captain Jorgan.  “And are to be?  Hey?”

Young Raybrock shook his head, and traced out with his fore-finger the words, “poor father’s five hundred pounds,” in the written paper.

“Go along,” said the captain.  “Five hundred pounds?  Yes?”

“That sum of money,” pursued the young fisherman, entering with the greatest earnestness on his demonstration, while the captain eyed him with equal earnestness, “was all my late father possessed.  When he died, he owed no man more than he left means to pay, but he had been able to lay by only five hundred pounds.”