{"id":"01KG6GMJF9F9MET64N3Y75YTRJ","cid":"bafkreifblghbtgjtccmtdg2n55vmp33v2ukqtx4muiifmjeu5bin45jp3e","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":597,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T03:55:03.879Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 2","source_file":"01KG6FXSCNX5F3D880P3YP3PKR","start_line":542,"text":"Bristol.’\r\n\r\n‘_Found_, say you? Well,’ throwing back his head, and looking up and\r\ndown the new recruit--‘well, it turns out to have been a pretty good\r\nfind. Hope they’ll find some more like you, my man; the fleet sadly\r\nneeds them.’\r\n\r\nYes, Billy Budd was a foundling, a presumable by-blow, and, evidently,\r\nno ignoble one. Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse.\r\n\r\nFor the rest, with little or no sharpness of faculty or any trace of the\r\nwisdom of the serpent, nor yet quite a dove, he possessed a certain\r\ndegree of intelligence along with the unconventional rectitude of a\r\nsound human creature--one to whom not yet has been proffered the\r\nquestionable apple of knowledge. He was illiterate; he could not read,\r\nbut he could sing, and like the illiterate nightingale was sometimes the\r\ncomposer of his own song.\r\n\r\nOf self-consciousness he seemed to have little or none, or about as much\r\nas we may reasonably impute to a dog of St. Bernard’s breed.\r\n\r\nHabitually being with the elements and knowing little more of the land\r\nthan as a beach, or, rather, that portion of the terraqueous globe\r\nprovidentially set apart for dance-houses, doxies and tapsters, in\r\nshort, what sailors call a ‘fiddlers’ green,’ his simple nature remained\r\nunsophisticated by those moral obliquities which are not in every case\r\nincomparable with that manufacturable thing known as respectability. But\r\nare sailor frequenters of fiddlers’ greens without vices? No; but less\r\noften than with landsmen do their vices, so-called, partake of\r\ncrookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than\r\nexuberance of vitality after long restraint, frank manifestations in\r\naccordance with natural law. By his original constitution, aided by the\r\nco-operating influences of his lot, Billy in many respects was little\r\nmore than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam\r\npresumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into\r\nhis company.\r\n\r\nAnd here be it submitted that, apparently going to corroborate the\r\ndoctrine of man’s fall (a doctrine now popularly ignored), it is\r\nobservable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate\r\npeculiarly characterise anybody in the external uniform of civilisation,\r\nthey will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention\r\nbut rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally\r\ntransmitted from a period prior to Cain’s city and citified man. The\r\ncharacter marked by such qualities has to an unvitiated taste an\r\nuntampered-with flavour like that of berries, while the man thoroughly\r\ncivilised, even in a fair specimen of the breed, has to the same moral\r\npalate a questionable smack as of a compounded wine. To any stray\r\ninheritor of these primitive qualities found, like Caspar Hauser,\r\nwandering dazed in any Christian capital of our time, the poet’s famous\r\ninvocation, near two thousand years ago, of the good rustic out of his\r\nlatitude in the Rome of the Cæsars, still appropriately holds:--\r\n\r\n            ‘Faithful in word and thought,\r\n             What hast Thee, Fabian, to the city brought.’\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 2"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6GK7XJNDPHXHRPR887TXSZ","peer_type":"section","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6FXSCNX5F3D880P3YP3PKR","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG2T49K0H5GDRB0G4YDTPG8H","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6GMJF6XTMRZK3YKQM06W87","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"},{"peer":"01KG6GMJF96MCYRM4DRK10A3J3","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T03:55:04.041Z","ts":"2026-01-30T03:55:13.146Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}