. What irritated most of all was his assuming, because I had
not arrived at his folly, the right to treat me as a child.

South and across the Bay of Biscay the weather gave us a halcyon
passage; the wind falling lighter and lighter until, within ten
leagues of Gibraltar, we ran into a flat calm, and Captain Pomery's
face began to show his vexation.

The vexation I could understand--for your seaman naturally hates calm
weather--but scarcely the degree of it in a man of temperament so
placid. Hitherto he had taken delight in the strains of Mr.
Badcock's flute. Suddenly, and almost pettishly, he laid an embargo
on that instrument, and moreover sent word down to the hold and
commanded old Worthyvale to desist from hammering on the ballast.
All noise, in fact, appeared to irritate him.

Mr. Badcock pocketed his flute in some dudgeon, and for occupation
fell to drinking with Mr. Fett; whose potations, if they did not
sensibly lighten the ship, heightened, at least, her semblance of
buoyancy with a deck-cargo of empty bottles. My father put no
restraint upon these topers.

"Drink, gentlemen," said he; "drink by all means so long as it amuses
you. I had far rather you exceeded than that I should appear
inhospitable."

"Magnifshent old man," Mr. Fett hiccuped to me confidentially,
"_an'_ magnifshent liquor. As the song shays--I beg your pardon, the
shong says--able 'make a cat speak an' man dumb--

"Like 'n old courtier of the queen's
An' the queen's old courtier--"

Chorus, Mr. Bawcock, _if_ you please, an', by the way, won't mind my
calling you Bawcock, will you? Good Shakespearean word, bawcock:
euphonious, too--

"Accomplisht eke to flute it and to sing,
Euphonious Bawcock bids the welkin ring."

"If," said Mr. Badcock, in an injured tone and with a dark glance aft
at Captain Pomery, "if a man don't _like_ my playing, he has only to
say so. I don't press it on any one. From all I ever heard, art is
a matter of taste. But I don't understand a man's being suddenly
upset by a tune that, only yesterday, he couldn't hear often enough."

Out of the little logic I had picked up at Oxford I tried to explain
to him the process known as _sorites_; and suggested that Captain
Pomery, while tolerant of "I attempt from Love's sickness to fly" up
to the hundredth repetition, might conceivably show signs of tiring
at the hundred-and-first. Yet in my heart I mistrusted my own
argument, and my