Captain Delano begins to feel that he has been unfair in suspecting Captain Cereno of criminal conspiracy, and he attempts to put his own mind at ease by reflecting on the past in a series of brief flashbacks to his childhood. In the course of his recollections, he employs the common English idiom of “the second childhood”:
“What, I, Amasa Delano—Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad—I, Amasa; the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the waterside to the school-house made from the old hulk;—I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; [...] Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is some one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote and drule, I’m afraid.”
Trying to clear his mind of his suspicions, Delano reflects on his childhood, when he was not “Captain Delano” but simply “Jack of the Beach,” who used to “paddle along the waterside to the school-house” among other simple and innocent childhood activities such as going “berrying” with his cousin. In reflecting upon his ordinary upbringing, he assures himself that he could not possibly have stumbled into an extraordinary mystery. Speaking to himself, he concludes that he is behaving childishly, a “child of the second childhood.” Here, he uses a common idiom that imagines old age as a return to the helplessness of youth. He castigates himself for his own childish paranoia, which he regards as a symptom of his own age.
