He followed him into his cabin, and the boy with his bright hair on the pillow smiled a greeting.
"It is a beautiful bed, Johnny," said the mate, stepping close to the cot, and looking at him with the affection which such a child as this will excite in a sailor's heart at sea, moved by thoughts of home and of the fair land he has left, of his own childhood perhaps, and visited by that mute sense of solitude, peril, and the holy and brooding presence of the Great Spirit, which is the impulse of the deep, and understood by those to whom the ocean, eternal and boundless in the constant recession of its horizon, is an interpretable face. He turned to the captain and exclaimed:
"If your boy ever dreams, sir, it is of the angels who guard his bed."
He kissed the little chap, and was going.
"A moment, Mr. Hardy," exclaimed the captain, who did not seem to have caught or noticed what the mate said. "This is an example of old Pearson's forethought and humanity."
He stepped, followed by Hardy, to a corner of the cabin, in which stood a small mahogany chest, and lifted the lid. This lid was furnished with scissors, syringes, and the like, and the contents of the chest consisted of a number of stoppered green bottles, as well as sticking-plaster, lint, and surgical instruments. The captain, pointing to the bottles as he spoke, said:
"This is laudanum; this is labelled morphia; this is atropine for the ulcerated eye; this is chlorodyne. Here are drugs enough to start a man as a chemist. This is a book," said he, half lifting a thin volume from a pocket and letting it slip back, "that tells you how to make use of all this stuff; ay, even the right dose of Glauber's salt is given."
"I hope there's no chance of Master Johnny handling those bottles, sir?" said the mate, who, though he gazed with curiosity at this revelation of the open lid, was not inattentive to the expression of the commander's face, which was one of superiority, as though he had appropriated and was triumphing in the merits of the kind foresight which were certainly not his but Pearson's.
"You will never look into this chest, Johnny?" said Hardy.
"His mother was the very soul of honour," exclaimed Captain Layard, "and that child cannot but be the spirit of truth and honesty itself."