"You are an enthusiast, I see," replied the other, with a smile.
"When I am in company with one," answered Burrel, laughing. His companion colored slightly, but good-humoredly, and the conversation went on in the same easy manner in which it had commenced, through the rest of their journey. It is unnecessary to give any farther details thereof; for such light nothings, though very pleasant to while away the hours in a stage-coach, are most excessively tiresome in the small pages of an octavo. Let it suffice that Captain Delaware, surprised and pleased with his companion, found the journey far shorter than he had expected. Indeed, so captivated was he, that in the whole of Burrel's deportment there was but one thing which he thought might have been altered to advantage, which was a certain air of taking every thing as a matter of course--a tone of indifference which men of the world acquire they know not well how, and which, in the present instance, blended in an extraordinary manner with the high feeling of the beautiful and the excellent, which his conversation breathed throughout.
That tone, however, is not without its advantages also; and the young sailor found that it might be serviceable, when, at Hartford Bridge, a person of a very different description was intruded upon them. He was a short, broad-made man, with long, baboonish arms, and a face on which nature had so plainly written the class to which it was to belong, that, had fortune, in some of her freaks, covered it either with the coronet of a peer, or a peasant's straw hat, his mother, or fortune, or nature, would have had much to answer for. Some of the features were good, however--the eyes were very tolerable, for instance; and the nose was not bad. But then the cheek-bones! good heavens, such cheek-bones! From Crim Tartary to Banff there is nothing to be seen like them. The mouth, too, was worse--one of those fearful mouths, whose broad, fat, wide-parted, irregular lips seem to vaticinate the fate of the owner with such distinctness, that no person of common foresight can see them without at once picturing the person who possesses them--not as about to be hanged, but as actually hanging. The skin that was over all was of that reddish, coarse, mottled kind, which puts one in mind of a gross strawberry; and although, as before said, the eyes in themselves were _goodish_, blue, meaningless eyes enough, yet the place where there should have grown eyelashes, being alone furnished with a red, knotty line in their room, gave them a ferret-like sharpness, without which they would have signified nothing at all.