strengthen the muscles of the larynx.'

'Well, you take the cake!' cried the captain.

'O, I'm good plucked enough,' pursued the sufferer with a broken

utterance. 'But it do seem bloomin' hard to me, that I should be

the only party down with this form of vice, and the only one to

do the funny business. I think one of you other parties might

wake up. Tell a fellow something.'

'The trouble is we've nothing to tell, my son,' returned the

captain.

'I'll tell you, if you like, what I was thinking,' said Herrick.

'Tell us anything,' said the clerk, 'I only want to be reminded

that I ain't dead.'

Herrick took up his parable, lying on his face and speaking

slowly and scarce above his breath, not like a man who has

anything to say, but like one talking against time.

'Well, I was thinking this,' he began: 'I was thinking I lay on

Papeete beach one night--all moon and squalls and fellows

coughing--and I was cold and hungry, and down in the mouth, and

was about ninety years of age, and had spent two hundred and

twenty of them on Papeete beach. And I was thinking I wished I

had a ring to rub, or had a fairy godmother, or could raise

Beelzebub. And I was trying to remember how you did it. I knew

you made a ring of skulls, for I had seen that in the

Freischultz: and that you took off your coat and turned up your

sleeves, for I had seen Formes do that when he was playing

Kaspar, and you could see (by the way he went about it) it was a

business he had studied; and that you ought to have something to

kick up a smoke and a bad smell, I dare say a cigar might do, and

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