‘Fit as a fiddle,’ answered Logan through a similar instrument.

‘Our exhibits are gone bust,’ answered Captain Noah Funkal.  ’Our professors are in fits.  Our darkeys are all dead.  Can your skipper come aboard?’

‘Just launching a boat,’ cried Logan.

Bude gave the necessary orders.  His captain stepped up to him and saluted.

‘Do you know what these red fire-flies were that come aboard, sir?’ he asked.

’Fire-flies?  Oh, musae volitantes sonorae, a common phenomenon in these latitudes,’ answered Bude.

Logan rejoiced to see that the earl was himself again.

‘The other gentlemen’s scientific beasts don’t seem to like them, sir?’

‘So Captain Funkal seems to imply,’ said Bude, and, taking the ropes, with Logan beside him, while the Pendragon lay to, he steered the boat towards the George Washington.

The captain welcomed them on deck in a scene of unusual character.  He himself had a revolver in one hand, and a belaying pin in the other; he had been quelling, by the tranquillising methods of Captain Kettle, a mutiny caused by the terror of the crew.  The sailors had attempted to leap overboard in the alarm caused by the invasion of the Berbalangs.

’You will excuse my friend and myself for not being in evening dress, during a visit at this hour,’ said Bude in the silkiest of tones.

‘Glad to see you shipshape, gentlemen,’ answered the American mariner.  ’My dudes of professors were prancing round in Tuxedos and Prince Alberts when the darned fire-flies came aboard.’

Bude bowed.  Study of Miss McCabe had taught him that Tuxedos and Prince Alberts mean evening dress and frock-coats.

‘Did your men have fits?’ asked the captain.

‘My captain, Captain Hardy, made a scientific inquiry about the—­insects,’ said Bude.  ‘The crew showed no emotion.’

‘I guess our fire-bugs were more on business than yours,’ said Captain Funkal; ’they’ve wrecked the exhibits, and killed the darkeys with fright:  except two, and they were exhibits themselves.  Will you honour me by stepping into my cabin, gentlemen.  I am glad to see sane white men to-night.’

Bude and Logan followed him through a scene of melancholy interest.  Beside the mast, within a shattered palisade, lay huddled the vast corpse of the Mylodon of Patagonia, couchant amidst his fodder of chopped hay.  The expression of the huge animal was placid and urbane in death.  He was the victim of the ceaseless curiosity of science.  Two of the five-horned antelope giraffes of Central Africa lay in a confused heap of horns and hoofs.  Beside an immense tank couched a figure in evening dress, swearing in a subdued tone.  Logan recognised Professor Potter.  He gently laid his hand on the Professor’s shoulder.  The Scottish savant looked up: 

‘It is a dommed mismanaged affair,’ he said.  ’I could have brought the poor beast safe enough from the Clyde to New York, but the Americans made me harl him round by yon island of camstairy deevils,’ and he shook his fist in the direction of Cagayan Sulu.