Every one was amazed at the man’s rashness.  The idea of deliberately inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible.  The retreat came to a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of it.  The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one.  He paused in the door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and contemplated the daring reptile in the corner.

“Certain of it?  Am I certain of it?  Do you think I’ve been lying about it?  What do you take me for?  Anybody that don’t know that circumstance, don’t know anything; a child ought to know it.  Read up your history!  Read it up-----, and don’t come asking a man if he’s certain about a bit of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know all about.”

Here the Admiral’s fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten.  Within three minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater.  Meantime Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what the old man was saying.  By and by, when the lull came, he said in the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably: 

“Now I understand it.  I always thought I knew that piece of history well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history; but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I said to myself, this sounds something like—­this is history—­this is putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if he is I will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me.  And that is what I want to do now—­for until you set that matter right it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it.”

Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased.  Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose.  He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his profanity failed him.  Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly: