ained his mental balance and laid his back to the tiller the
other way.

"Sorry I've no chairs for you gentlemen," he remarked to the seated
travellers; "but I guess the deck's as soft as the wooden kind."

"Don't mention it, my dear captain," said Coristine, as he sprang to his
feet; "we were only taking the latitude and longitude, but it's hard
work on the bones."

"You allow yourself too much latitude, sir, both in your actions and in
your unjustifiable remarks," muttered the pedagogue, more slowly
assuming the perpendicular.

"Now, captain," cried the lawyer, "I leave it you, sir, as a judge of
language, good and bad. What is the worst thing to call a man, a muff or
an idiot!"

The captain toyed with the lanyard of his tortoise shell rimmed glasses,
then put them deliberately across his nose, coughed judiciously, and
gave his opinion:--

"An ijit is a man that's born without sense and can't keep himself, d'ye
see? But a muff is that stupid, like Sylvanus here, that he can't use
the sense he's got. That being the case, a muff is worse than an ijit."

"Mr. Wilkinson, I bow, as in duty bound, to the verdict of the court,
and humbly apologize for having called you something worse than an
idiot. In my poor opinion, sir, you are not worse than the unfortunate
creature thus described."

Wilkinson was about to retort, when The Crew called out that the
schooner was in the Bay, and that the lights of Barrie could be seen in
the distance.

"Keep to your helm, Sylvanus," growled the captain; "there's three pair
of eyes here as good as yourn, and I hope with more sense abaft 'em."

Sylvanus relapsed into silence of a modified kind, merely whistling in a
soft way his original copyright tune. As the travellers had never seen
Kempenfeldt Bay before, they admired it very much, and forgot their
little misunderstanding, while arm in arm they leaned over the bulwarks,
and quoted little snatches of poetry in one another's ears. The
twinkling lights of the town upon the cliffs suggested many a pleasing
passage, so that Wilkinson told his dear Corry he was more than repaid
for the trouble incident on their expedition by the sweet satisfaction
of gazing on such a scene in company with a kindred spirit of poesy. To
this his comrade replied, "Wilks, my dear boy, next to my mother you're
the best friend I ever hope to have."

"Let us cherish these sentiments for one another, kind friend, and the
cloud on the horizon of our tour