"You're begging the question," exclaimed the Vice, examining his scorched instep. "An apology in the shape of your flask of olive oil will be satisfactory. How do you explain the river's shrinking, any how?"
"Why, it's growing deeper, and as there's only a given amount of water, it can't occupy more space in one direction without narrowing in another. It's a precedent you might safely follow in politics."
The Vice reflected for a moment; then a sweet smile irradiated his features, his left eye closed, his right forefinger was slowly laid athwart his nose, and he replied,
"I knew that long ago, my boy; it's the mainstay of the business—the system, I mean. Let the party broaden, and 'Othello's occupation's gone.'"
But the Cook, having relieved his mind of chaff which nevertheless carried (unknown to him) a grain of wheat, determined to inflict upon some one else the questioning to which he had been subjected, so he speedily overhauled the other Chrysalid containing the Purser, and demanded the reason of the river's narrowing. The Purser abruptly ceased patching a sonnet which he had scribbled upon the blade of a spare paddle, and answered,
"The water-drops, so long united, have a premonition of the doom of separation soon to befall them, and they cling more closely to each other, for a last fond interchange of sentiment."
"Water is not compressible by its own volition," promptly replied the Cook, who loved cyclopedias, and never knew sentiment when he encountered it. But the Purser, who hated questions so intensely that, had he lived in the time of that vigorous old interrogation point yclept Socrates, would have tramped a thousand miles for hemlock rather than have left the sage unpoisoned, ran ashore to avenge himself upon the Commodore, who had beached his boat to await the coming up of his lagging fleet. To the commanding officer the Purser put the disturbing question as to the cause of the narrowing of the river, and with the following result:
"Rivers shrink toward their natural channel for the same reason that capitalists take to government bonds—because their banks are slippery, and suffer by the many rushes upon them."
The villages grew nearer together as rapidly as the shores did, and ahead and aloft there were always in sight several church spires of the unvarying pattern peculiar to churches along the river. Every spire was metal-covered and bright, the latter perhaps because there were no opposition houses of worship to cause that dismalness of aspect affected by all churches in neighborhoods where religion tends more to squabbling than to sanctity. At short intervals appeared the residences of the priests, each indicated by a tall cross at the gateway. The Commodore, with his peculiar regard for the church so near a sister to his own, signified a half-intention to go ashore to confession, but on being reminded that but a week remained for the cruise, and that no such short time would suffice an editor in which to unburden his soul of its manifold sins and transgressions, he forbore to make others suffer for his own faults. It was noticed thereafter, however, that he doffed his helmet respectfully whenever he sailed past a church, and that when his own day for foraging came, he preferred always to purchase milk from a priest's housekeeper.
About this time the Purser began to drop behind in a manner inexplicable even by the known slowness of his boat; even the slow-sailing Vice distanced him, so the Cook, not without a special appreciation of the Purser's tobacco, went ashore to wait for his comrade to come up. The bank of the river was high, and the Cook, who had been hugging the shore for shade, had made company for himself by roaring sundry staves, supposing that no one but his comrades were within listening distance. Great was his surprise, therefore, when on clambering up the bank he beheld a closely built village in front of him. Had the locality been any but Acadia, even the river banks could not have hidden the town, but here the dwellings are as modest of mien as the natives. Few boast of a second story, nor is the floor of the first very much raised above the level of the ground. In exterior dimensions, most of the houses reminded the Cook of his chicken-house at home, or of those suburban villas which cluster so thickly upon the hills adjoining Central Park. But with size the last-named parallel ceased, for the exteriors were painted, the floors, seen through the open doors and windows, were clean, and no pig disported himself about the door-step. Children clustered about them as thickly as they always do about very small houses, but the matrons lacked that fagged, heaven-hungry mien peculiar to their sisters in climes where the Scripture is fulfilled by the greatest being the servant of all—all of her own servants. Here one might speak of love in a cottage and not be laughed out of society—hopeless, indeed, would be his fate were he to desire any other sort of asylum for his affections.