to 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 _Freischuetz_:
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 daresay a
cigar might do, and that you ought to say the Lord's Prayer backwards.
Well, I wondered if I could do that; it seemed rather a feat, you see.
And then I wondered if I would say it forward, and I thought I did.
Well, no sooner had I got to _world without end_, than I saw a man in a
_pariu_, and with a mat under his arm, come along the beach from the
town. He was rather a hard-favoured old party, and he limped and
crippled, and all the time he kept coughing. At first I didn't cotton to
his looks, I thought, and then I got sorry for the old soul because he
coughed so hard. I remembered that we had some of that cough mixture the
American consul gave the captain for Hay. It never did Hay a ha'porth of
service, but I thought it might do the old gentleman's business for him,
and stood up. '_Yorana!_' says I. '_Yorana!_' says he. 'Look here,' I
said, 'I've got some first-rate stuff in a