"Your pardon, Mr. Green, and green enough you are, if you lay down that doctrine," interrupted Captain Truck, "in which neither Vattel, nor the revised statutes will bear you out. A passenger cannot remove his effects from a ship, until his passage be first paid."
"That, sir, I dispute, in a question affecting the king's revenues. The claims of government precede all others, and the money that has once belonged to the crown, and which has not been regularly paid away by the crown, is the crown's still."
"Crowns and coronations! Perhaps, Master Green, you think you are in Somerset House at this present speaking?"
Now Mr. Green was so completely a star of a confined orbit, that his ideas seldom described a tangent to their ordinary revolutions. He was so much accustomed to hear of England ruling colonies, the East and the West, Canada, the Cape, and New South Wales, that it was not an easy matter for him to conceive himself to be without the influence of the British laws. Had he quitted home with the intention to emigrate, or even to travel, it is probable that his mind would have kept a more equal pace with his body, but summoned in haste from his desk, and with the office spectacles on his nose, it is not so much a matter of wonder that he hardly realized the truths of his present situation. The man-of-war, in which everything was His Majesty's, sustained this feeling, and it was too sudden a change to expect such a man to abandon all his most cherished notions at a moment's warning. The irreverent exclamation of Captain Truck shocked him, and he did not fail to show as much by the disgust pictured in his countenance.
"I am in one of His Majesty's packets, sir, I presume, where, you will permit me to say, a greater deference for the high ceremonies of the kingdom ought to be found."
"This would make even old Joe Bunk laugh. You are in a New York liner, sir, over which no majesty has any control, but their majesties John Griswold and Co. Why, my good sir, the sea has unsettled your brain!"
Now, Mr. Green did know that the United States of America had obtained their independence, but the whole proceeding was so mixed up with rebellion, and a French alliance, in his mind, that he always doubted whether the new republic had a legal existence at all, and he had been heard to express his surprise that the twelve judges had not long since decided this state of things to be unconstitutional, and overturned the American government by mandamus. His disgust increased, accordingly, as Captain Truck's irreverence manifested itself in stronger terms, and there was great danger that the harmony, which had hitherto prevailed between the parties, would be brought to a violent termination.
"The respect for the crown in a truly loyal subject, sir," Mr. Green returned sharply, "is not to be unsettled by the sea; not in my case, at least, whatever it might have been, in your own."
"My own! why, the devil, sir, do you take me for a subject?"
"A truant one, I fear, though you may have been born in London itself."