He didn't whisper it; he didn't tell it to a friend in confidence; he
bellowed it out at the top of his voice so all the passengers could hear
him. The only possible excuse which can be offered for that captain's
behavior is that his staggering was due not to the motion of the ship
but to alcoholic stimulant. Could you imagine Little Sure Shot, the
Terror of the Pawnees, drunk or sober, doing an asinine thing like that?
Not in ten thousand years, you couldn't. But then we must remember
that Little Sure Shot, being a moral dime-novel hero, never indulged in
alcoholic beverages under any circumstances.

The boy who stood on the burning deck has been played up as an example
of youthful heroism for the benefit of the young of our race ever since
Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans set him down in black and white. I deny
that he was heroic. I insist that he merely was feeble-minded. Let us
give this youth the careful once-over: The scene is the Battle of the
Nile. The time is August, 1798. When the action of the piece begins the
boy stands on the burning deck whence all but him had fled. You see,
everyone else aboard had had sense enough to beat it, but he stuck
because his father had posted him there. There was no good purpose
he might serve by sticking, except to furnish added material for the
poetess, but like the leather-headed young imbecile that he was he stood
there with his feet getting warmer all the time, while the flame that
lit the battle's wreck shone round him o'er the dead. After which:

There came a burst of thunder sound;
The boy--oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds, that far around
With fragments strewed the sea--

Ask the waves. Ask the fragments. Ask Mrs. Hemans. Or, to save time,
inquire of me.

He has become totally extinct. He is no more and he never was very much.
Still we need not worry. Mentally he must have been from the very outset
a liability rather than an asset. Had he lived, undoubtedly he would
have wound up in a home for the feeble-minded. It is better so, as it
is--better that he should be spread about over the surface of the ocean
in a broad general way, thus saving all the expense and trouble of
gathering him up and burying him and putting a tombstone over him. He
was one of the incurables.

Once upon a time, writing a little piece on another subject, I advanced
the claim that the champion half-wit of all poetic anthology was Sweet
Alice, who, as described by Mr. English, wept wit