“Oh, that will do—­that’s enough.  If you have got your hand in for inventing authors and testimony, I have nothing more to say—­let them be on the same side.”

We don’t mind the Oracle.  We rather like him.  We can tolerate the Oracle very easily, but we have a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot on board, and they do distress the company.  The one gives copies of his verses to consuls, commanders, hotel keepers, Arabs, Dutch—­to anybody, in fact, who will submit to a grievous infliction most kindly meant.  His poetry is all very well on shipboard, notwithstanding when he wrote an “Ode to the Ocean in a Storm” in one half hour, and an “Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship” in the next, the transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with the passengers.

The other personage I have mentioned is young and green, and not bright, not learned, and not wise.  He will be, though, someday if he recollects the answers to all his questions.  He is known about the ship as the “Interrogation Point,” and this by constant use has become shortened to “Interrogation.”  He has distinguished himself twice already.  In Fayal they pointed out a hill and told him it was 800 feet high and 1,100 feet long.  And they told him there was a tunnel 2,000 feet long and 1,000 feet high running through the hill, from end to end.  He believed it.  He repeated it to everybody, discussed it, and read it from his notes.  Finally, he took a useful hint from this remark, which a thoughtful old pilgrim made: 

“Well, yes, it is a little remarkable—­singular tunnel altogether—­stands up out of the top of the hill about two hundred feet, and one end of it sticks out of the hill about nine hundred!”

Here in Gibraltar he corners these educated British officers and badgers them with braggadocio about America and the wonders she can perform!  He told one of them a couple of our gunboats could come here and knock Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea!

At this present moment half a dozen of us are taking a private pleasure excursion of our own devising.  We form rather more than half the list of white passengers on board a small steamer bound for the venerable Moorish town of Tangier, Africa.  Nothing could be more absolutely certain than that we are enjoying ourselves.  One can not do otherwise who speeds over these sparkling waters and breathes the soft atmosphere of this sunny land.  Care cannot assail us here.  We are out of its jurisdiction.

We even steamed recklessly by the frowning fortress of Malabat (a stronghold of the Emperor of Morocco) without a twinge of fear.  The whole garrison turned out under arms and assumed a threatening attitude—­yet still we did not fear.  The entire garrison marched and counter-marched within the rampart, in full view—­yet notwithstanding even this, we never flinched.