Funds, universally the most convincing of credentials, are placed at Dr. Bouthoin’s disposal:  only it is requested, that for the present the expedition be secret.  ‘Better so,’ says pure Saxon’s champion.  On a day patented for secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the patent, the Rev. Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate, the Rev. Mancate Semhians, stumbling across portmanteaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and other tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths in the ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive, for the biggest adventure ever embarked on by a far-thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic pair speaking pure Saxon or other.

Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the custom of our period (called the Realistic) to create, when casual opportunity offers, a belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience.  He passed under veil the Rev. Doctor’s acknowledgement of Neptune’s power, and the temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians.  Proceeding at once to the comments of these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness of certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant, pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather.  With him is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica.  An interesting couple for the beguilement of a voyage:  she so beautifully moderates his irascible incisiveness!  Yet there is a strange tone that they have.  What, then, of the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages the young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating outside them to say a word?  What of that outpouring, explosive, equally voluble, uncontrolled M. Bobinikine, a Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued like the pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive boyhood, which smokes on the dish from the pot?  And what of another, hitherto unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name transpires as Pisistratus Mytharete?  He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some lines of Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language.  Greek, is it?  Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of the poetic chants?  Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation.  Dr. Bouthoin caps himself with the offended Don.  Mr. Semhians opens half an eye and a whole mouth.  There must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another in privacy.  Delphica draws Mr. Semhians aside.

Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labrador at the transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo, Mr. Semhians faintly tells of a conversation he has had with the ingenuous fair one; and she ardent as he for the throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths of the races of mankind.  Strange!—­she partly suspects the Frenchman, the Russian, the attentive silent Greek, to be all of them bound for the Court of Japan.  Concurrents?  Can it be?  We are absolutely to enter on a contention with rivals?  Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr. Gannius.  He is astonished, he says; he could not have imagined it!