st angel
could wish. I say it, respected sir, with confidence."

"Gammon! You don't mean what you say. Else you are like a landsman at
sea: don't know the ropes, the very things everlastingly pulled before
your eyes. Serpent-like, they glide about, traveling blocks too subtle
for you. In short, the entire ship is a riddle. Why, you green ones
wouldn't know if she were unseaworthy; but still, with thumbs stuck back
into your arm-holes, pace the rotten planks, singing, like a fool, words
put into your green mouth by the cunning owner, the man who, heavily
insuring it, sends his ship to be wrecked--

'A wet sheet and a flowing sea!'--

and, sir, now that it occurs to me, your talk, the whole of it, is
but a wet sheet and a flowing sea, and an idle wind that follows fast,
offering a striking contrast to my own discourse."

"Sir," exclaimed the man with the brass-plate, his patience now more or
less tasked, "permit me with deference to hint that some of your remarks
are injudiciously worded. And thus we say to our patrons, when they
enter our office full of abuse of us because of some worthy boy we may
have sent them--some boy wholly misjudged for the time. Yes, sir, permit
me to remark that you do not sufficiently consider that, though a small
man, I may have my small share of feelings."

"Well, well, I didn't mean to wound your feelings at all. And that they
are small, very small, I take your word for it. Sorry, sorry. But truth
is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the
way. Hope you understand me. Don't want to hurt you. All I say is, what
I said in the first place, only now I swear it, that all boys are
rascals."

"Sir," lowly replied the other, still forbearing like an old lawyer
badgered in court, or else like a good-hearted simpleton, the butt of
mischievous wags, "Sir, since you come back to the point, will you allow
me, in my small, quiet way, to submit to you certain small, quiet views
of the subject in hand?"

"Oh, yes!" with insulting indifference, rubbing his chin and looking the
other way. "Oh, yes; go on."

"Well, then, respected sir," continued the other, now assuming as
genteel an attitude as the irritating set of his pinched five-dollar
suit would permit; "well, then, sir, the peculiar principles, the
strictly philosophical principles, I may say," guardedly rising in
dignity, as he guardedly rose on his toes, "upon which our office is
founded, has led me and my ass