"Ah, poor Sir Joseph, I know perfectly what it means to love not wisely but too well," she remarks, sighing tenderly and looking most sentimentally at the Captain. She does this so capably that as she goes off the deck the Captain looks after her and remarks abstractedly:
"A plump and pleasing person!" At this blessed minute the daughter Josephine, who does not love in the right place, and who is beloved from all quarters at once, wanders upon the deck with a basket of flowers in her hand. Then she begins to sing very distractedly about loving the wrong man, and that "hope is dead," and several other pitiable things, which are very funny. The Captain, her father, is watching her, and presently he admonishes her to look her best, and to stop sighing all over the ship—at least till her high-born suitor, Sir Joseph Porter, shall have made his expected visit.
"You must look your best to-day, Josephine, because the Admiral is coming on board to ask your hand in marriage." At this Josephine nearly drops into the sea.
"Father, I esteem, I reverence Sir Joseph but alas I do not love him. I have the bad taste instead to love a lowly sailor on board your own ship. But I shall stifle my love. He shall never know it though I carry it to the tomb."
"That is precisely the spirit I should expect to behold in my daughter, my dear, and now take Sir Joseph's picture and study it well. I see his barge approaching. If you gaze upon the pictured noble brow of the Admiral, I think it quite likely that you will have time to fall madly in love with him before he can throw a leg over the rail, my darling. Anyway, do your best at it."
"My own, thoughtful father," Josephine murmurs while a song of Sir Joseph's sailors is heard approaching nearer and nearer. Then the crew of H.M.S. Pinafore take up the shout, and sing a rousing welcome to Sir Joseph and all his party. Almost immediately Sir Joseph and his numerous company of sisters and cousins and aunts prance upon the shining deck. They have a gorgeous time of it.
"Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!" the Captain and his crew cry, and then Sir Joseph informs everybody of his greatness in this song:
