of truth,—­the fact that his wife was really dead, and that he had not seen his family for two years,—­why should he not place implicit faith in all the fictions reared upon it?  It was probable that he felt a real sorrow for her loss, and that he found a fantastic consolation in depicting the circumstances of her death so that they should look like his inevitable misfortunes rather than his faults.  He might well have repented his offence during those two years of prison; and why should he not now cast their dreariness and shame out of his memory, and replace them with the freedom and adventure of a two years’ voyage to China,—­so probable, in all respects, that the fact should appear an impossible nightmare?  In the experiences of his life he had abundant material to furnish forth the facts of such a voyage, and in the weariness and lassitude that should follow a day’s walking equally after a two years’ voyage and two years’ imprisonment, he had as much physical proof in favor of one hypothesis as the other.  It was doubtless true, also, as he said, that he had gone to his house at dawn, and sat down on the threshold of his ruined home; and perhaps he felt the desire he had expressed to see his daughter, with a purpose of beginning life anew; and it may have cost him a veritable pang when he found that his little ones did not know him.  All the sentiments of the situation were such as might persuade a lively fancy of the truth of its own inventions; and as he heard these continually repeated by the contributor in their search for Mr. Hapford, they must have acquired an objective force and repute scarcely to be resisted.  At the same time, there were touches of nature throughout Jonathan Tinker’s narrative which could not fail to take the faith of another.  The contributor, in reviewing it, thought it particularly charming that his mariner had not overdrawn himself, or attempted to paint his character otherwise than as it probably was; that he had shown his ideas and practices of life to be those of a second mate, nor more nor less, without the gloss of regret or the pretences to refinement that might be pleasing to the supposed philanthropist with whom he had fallen in.  Captain Gooding was of course a true portrait; and there was nothing in Jonathan Tinker’s statement of the relations of a second mate to his superiors and his inferiors which did not agree perfectly with what the contributor had just read in “Two Years before the Mast,”—­a book which had possibly cast its glamour upon the adventure.  He admired also the just and perfectly characteristic air of grief in the bereaved husband and father,—­those occasional escapes from the sense of loss into a brief hilarity and forgetfulness, and those relapses into the hovering gloom, which every one has observed in this poor, crazy human nature when oppressed by sorrow, and which it would have been hard to simulate.  But, above all, he exulted in that supreme stroke of the imagination given by the second mate when, at parting, he said he believed he would go down and sleep on board the vessel.  In view of this, the State’s Prison theory almost appeared a malign and foolish scandal.