The honest captain, however, did not treat the matter so lightly, for he improved the opportunity to light a fresh cigar, throwing the still smoking stump into Mrs. Legend's grate, through a lane of literati, as he afterwards boasted, as coolly as he could have thrown it overboard, under other circumstances. Luckily for his reputation for sentiment, he mistook "ecstatic," a word he had never heard before, for "erratic;" and recollecting sundry roving maniacs that he had seen, he answered promptly--
"Despair, out and out."
"I knew it," said one.
"It's in nature," added a second.
"All can feel its truth," rejoined a third.
"This point may now be set down as established," cried Florio, "and I hope no more will be said about it."
"This is encouragement to the searchers after truth," put in Captain Kant.
"Pray, Hon. and Rev. Mr. Truck," asked Lucius Junius Brutus, at the joint suggestion of Junius Brutus and Brutus, "does the Princess Victoria smoke?"
"If she did not, sir, where would be the use in being a princess. I suppose you know that all the tobacco seized in England, after a deduction to informers, goes to the crown."
"I object to this usage," remarked Captain Kant, "as irreligious, French, and tending to sans-culotteism. I am willing to admit of this distinguished instance as an exception; but on all other grounds, I shall maintain that it savours of infidelity to smoke. The Prussian government, much the best of our times, never smokes."