“You’re a perfect idiot, Coristine.”

“You’re a regular old muff, Wilkinson.”

The Crew, thinking this was a special pantomime got up impromptu for his benefit, roared with laughter, and applauded on the tiller.  He was about to execute a hoedown within tiller limits to testify his sympathy with the fun, when the captain appeared in all his Sunday finery.

“Let her away, you laughing hyena,” he yelled to the unlucky Sylvanus, who regained 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 will never rise to darken its happy future,” after which the learned dominie recited the words of Ducis:—­