The fumes of the punch had thrown the ideas of these two worthies into another channel, and the reverie into which they had fallen was so deep as to render them perfectly unconscious of all that was going on around them.
The captain was the first to recover from his meditations.
"Ease her! Stop her!" he cried, awaking with a yawn.
Then, glancing round at the company, his eye first caught sight of the poet's brow crowned with laurels.
"Odds bobs, messmate!" he cried, "what the deuce have they been doing to your figurehead?"
"Ah! captain," said one of the members, "you do not know what you have lost. You've missed a song."
"Missed a song, have I? Well, I thought someone must have been singing; it came in my dream. But what, in the name of Davy Jones, has Mr. Parnassus been taking. Why, one would think he had been taking a glass of prussic acid, to break out all over laurel leaves like that."
"That," said the chairman, "is the crown awarded to genius. Mr. Parnassus has this evening—or, I should say, this morning—favoured us with a poem."
"Humph!" said the captain, who was not of a poetical nature himself.
"Yes," continued the chairman, "a poem; the work of his own pure brain, for which he has been rewarded with the crown that now adorns his temples, a crown of no intrinsic value, as you perceive, like the bejewelled diadem of royalty, but which, nevertheless, has been sought after by minds no less ambitious in the early days of ancient history, when the love of honour alone was a deeper incitement to the soul than the mere love of worldly pelf, and when once obtained, was guarded as zealously——"