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166 The acuteness and the significance of the Captain’s eye as he cocked it in reply, no words short of those unutterable Chinese words before referred to could describe.

"Come!" said the Captain, unspeakably encouraged, "what do you say? Am I right or wrong?"

So much had the Captain expressed in his eye, emboldened and incited by Mr. Carker’s smiling urbanity, that he felt himself in as fair a condition to put the question, as if he had expressed his sentiments with the utmost elaboration.

"Right," said Mr. Carker, "I have no doubt."

"Out’ard bound with fair weather, then, I say," cried Captain Cuttle.

Mr. Carker smiled assent.

"Wind right astarn, and plenty of it," pursued the Captain.

Mr. Carker smiled assent again.

"Aye, aye!" said Captain Cuttle, greatly relieved and pleased. "I know’d how she headed, well enough; I told Wal’r so. Thank’ee, thank’ee."

"Gay has brilliant prospects," observed Mr. Carker, stretching his mouth wider yet: "all the world before him."

"All the world and his wife too, as the saying is," returned the delighted Captain.

At the word "wife’ (which he had uttered without design), the Captain stopped, cocked his eye again, and putting the glazed hat on the top of the knobby stick, gave it a twirl, and looked sideways at his always-smiling friend.

"I’d bet a gill of old Jamaica," said the Captain, eyeing him attentively, "that I know what you’re a smiling at."

Mr. Carker took his cue, and smiled the more.

"It goes no farther?" said the Captain, making a poke at the door with the knobby stick to assure himself that it was shut.

"Not an inch," said Mr. Carker.

"You’re thinking of a capital F perhaps?" said the Captain.

Mr. Carker didn’t deny it.

"Anything about a L," said the Captain, "or a O?"

Mr. Carker still smiled.

"Am I right, again?" inquired the Captain in a whisper, with the scarlet circle on his forehead swelling in his triumphant joy.

Mr. Carker, in reply, still smiling, and now nodding assent, Captain Cuttle rose and squeezed him by the hand, assuring him, warmly, that they were on the same tack, and that as for him (Cuttle) he had laid his course that way all along. "He know’d her first," said the Captain, with all the secrecy and gravity that the subject demanded, "in an uncommon manner—you remember his finding her in the street when she was a’most a babby—he has liked her ever since, and she him, as much as two youngsters can. We ’ve always said, Sol Gills and me, that they was cut out for each other."

A cat, or a monkey, or a hyena, or a death’s-head, could not have shown the Captain more teeth at one time, than Mr. Carker showed him at this period of their interview.