OFF TO MASHERLAND.
(By Our Own Grandolph.)
I pause in my communications. Friends, real friends, have wired over accounts of me on the trip, which have not been written by "friendlies." Somebody wrote to Black and White what purported to be Notes about me aboard the gallant Grantully Castle, than which a better-found vessel—"found" is the word—never put to sea. This somebody ("bless him!"—DR-MM-ND W-LFF will know what I mean) observes that "he didn't notice" any particular gratitude on my part towards Captain HAY and his talented assistants. Hay! what? why, confound them, I was all gratitude! Is it because I did not run at him, embrace him, and shake his arms off, that therefore I did not feel grateful! I was awfully grateful. I felt inclined to alter the name of the vessel to the Gratefully Castle. But "she" (you always call a vessel "she"—isn't that nautical?) "is" as the song says "another's, and never can be mine!" so I can't change her name. I was overpowered by my feelings—and what does that mean but the swallowing, with a gurgle in the throat, of the silent tear, and the avoidance of the topic uppermost in one's mind at the moment.
"The soldier leant upon his sword, and wiped away a tear"—but the sailor didn't, Verb. sap. What did I do? Why, in my note of notes, my Private Diary, I made this mem., "Make Hay while the sun shines." Now what, I ask any unprejudiced person, what does this mean? If Captain HAY were suddenly to be promoted in the hay-day of his valuable career to be an Admiral, would he suspect that he owed this elevation to the man who, strictly obeying the ship's orders, never even spoke to the man at the wheel? Now to come to the next point. This correspondent girds at my having had a special cabin and a special steward. Why! the envious grumbler! if he had been as specially unwell as I was—but there, I own I lose patience with him—didn't I go out as a "Special," and if a Special doesn't have everything special about him, he is simply obtaining money under false pretences. I've a great mind—I hear the jeerer snigger in his sleeve—but I repeat emphatically I have a great mind to come back. "He will return, I know him well," my traducers may sing; and I shall return when I consider my special work specially done in my own special manner, and be blowed to em all, the detractors!
He grumbles because I had a special portable light all to myself, "when I wanted to play cards." Aha! do we see the cloven hoof now? Was I to play cards in the dark? Those who know me best know that I am all fair and above-board, and no hole-and-corner gambling for me. And what tale has he to tell? Why that "Another night, not using his special light at the time, two other passengers began a game of chess under its rays." Which they had no right whatever to do. But I winked at it, and when the first officer was coming his rounds I winked at them; but this friendly act on my part they did not heed, and consequently to save them from being put in irons and confined in the deepest dungeon beneath the Grantully Castle moat, I "came along just then," as he reports, "and removed the lamp to another part of the deck, leaving the chess-players in the dark"—as if this consequence were anything extraordinary when a lamp is removed! Why any schoolboy, the merest tyro in Scripture History, knows where the great Hebrew Lawgiver was when the candle went out. And were these passengers to be exempt from the action of Nature's ordinary laws! Bah!—"without a word of apology or explanation." I had winked, but they were worse than blind horses, and more resembled the inferior quadruped in obstinately refusing to move, or in subsequently acknowledging this act of thoughtful kindness on my part.
As to my eating for breakfast a flying-fish, which somebody on board had caught and given me, all I ask is, why shouldn't I? I never had eaten a flying-fish before, and I don't think I ever shall again. If the gentleman who caught it didn't want me to eat it, he should have said so: for there were three courses open to him; viz., first, to refuse to give it me; secondly, to give it me on condition that I kept it in memory of the occasion; thirdly, to throw it back into the sea. But there was only one course open to me when I got it, and that was the first course at breakfast; the second course was kidgeree. It was a small fish just enough for one, and now I rather fancy I remember this Black and White correspondent, for it must have been he, coming to my table, eyeing the fish, smacking his lips, and observing that he "had never had the chance of tasting a fried flying-fish." At that moment I was just finishing the tail (a sweet morsel and not the worst part by any means), and there was nothing left to offer him. So he went away disappointed, with a grudge against yours truly. This, Sir, is the true tale of the flying-fish, and if it isn't, let me hear the revised version from my aspersers and caluminators. I can write no more to-day. I am boiling over, and must go and kick somebody. Yours, &c.,
