“’Pears that he can’t qualify, neither.  Well, I didn’t expect nothing out of him.  I never see one of them poets yet that knowed anything.  He’ll go down now and grind out about four reams of the awfullest slush about that old rock and give it to a consul, or a pilot, or a nigger, or anybody he comes across first which he can impose on.  Pity but somebody’d take that poor old lunatic and dig all that poetry rubbage out of him.  Why can’t a man put his intellect onto things that’s some value?  Gibbons, and Hippocratus, and Sarcophagus, and all them old ancient philosophers was down on poets—­”

“Doctor,” I said, “you are going to invent authorities now and I’ll leave you, too.  I always enjoy your conversation, notwithstanding the luxuriance of your syllables, when the philosophy you offer rests on your own responsibility; but when you begin to soar—­when you begin to support it with the evidence of authorities who are the creations of your own fancy—­I lose confidence.”

That was the way to flatter the doctor.  He considered it a sort of acknowledgment on my part of a fear to argue with him.  He was always persecuting the passengers with abstruse propositions framed in language that no man could understand, and they endured the exquisite torture a minute or two and then abandoned the field.  A triumph like this, over half a dozen antagonists was sufficient for one day; from that time forward he would patrol the decks beaming blandly upon all comers, and so tranquilly, blissfully happy!

But I digress.  The thunder of our two brave cannon announced the Fourth of July, at daylight, to all who were awake.  But many of us got our information at a later hour, from the almanac.  All the flags were sent aloft except half a dozen that were needed to decorate portions of the ship below, and in a short time the vessel assumed a holiday appearance.  During the morning, meetings were held and all manner of committees set to work on the celebration ceremonies.  In the afternoon the ship’s company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the asthmatic melodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the choir chased it to cover, and George came in with a peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered it.  Nobody mourned.

We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional and I do not endorse it), and then the President, throned behind a cable locker with a national flag spread over it, announced the “Reader,” who rose up and read that same old Declaration of Independence which we have all listened to so often without paying any attention to what it said; and after that the President piped the Orator of the Day to quarters and he made that same old speech about our national greatness which we so religiously believe and so fervently applaud.  Now came the choir into court again, with the complaining instruments, and assaulted “Hail Columbia”; and when victory hung wavering in the scale, George returned with his dreadful wild-goose stop turned on and the choir won, of course.  A minister pronounced the benediction, and the patriotic little gathering disbanded.  The Fourth of July was safe, as far as the Mediterranean was concerned.