Cai winced. "On a bust, did you say? Whose bust?"
"A bust of Pallas, sir, in the alleged possession of Mr Poe himself: Pallas being otherwise Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom, usually represented with an Owl."
"I don't know much about birds," confessed Cai, reduced to helplessness by this erudition. "And I don't know anything about poetry, more's the pity—having been caught young and apprenticed to the sea."
"And nothing to be ashamed of in that, Captain Hocken!"
'The sea, the sea, the open sea—
The blue, the fresh, the ever free.'
"I daresay you've often felt like that about it, as did the late Barry Cornwall, otherwise Bryan Waller Procter, whose daughter, the gifted Adelaide Anne Procter, prior to her premature decease, composed 'The Lost Chord,' everywhere so popular as a cornet solo. It is one of the curiosities of literature," went on Mr Benny confidentially, "that the author of that breezy (not to say briny) outburst could not even cross from Dover to Calais without being prostrated by mal de mer; insomuch that his good lady (who happened, by the way, to survive him for a number of years, and, in fact, died quite recently), being of a satirical humour, and herself immune from that distressing complaint, used—as I once read in a magazine article—to walk up and down the deck before him on these occasions, mischievously quoting his own verses,—"
'I'm on the sea, I'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be:
I love (O, how I love!) to ride
On the fierce, foaming, bursting tide,'
"et coetera. You'll excuse my rattling on in this fashion. So few people in Troy take an interest in literature: and it has so many by-ways!"
"I'm afraid," confessed Cai, more and more bewildered, "that my education was pretty badly neglected, 'specially in literature, though for some reason or another I'm not bad at spellin'. But, puttin' spellin' aside, that's just why I've come to you. I want you to help me with a letter, if you will."
"Why, of course I will," instantly responded Mr Benny, pushing his translations of the 'Fasti' aside and producing from a drawer some sheets of fresh paper.