Dogvane took advantage of this diversion to slip in another slide. "Behold!" he cried, "your happy villages, with their churches, nestling in amongst the trees. Behold your towns and cities, the monuments of your industry and intelligence! See the tall tapering chimneys rising far into the murky sky. Look down, my master; look down at your rivers thickly studded with innumerable ships." Dogvane said not a word about the nationality of those ships. He did not tell his master that they belonged, a good many of them, to the innumerable cheap-Jacks that infested the shores.
"Dogvane!" cried the Buccaneer, as he wiped the small glass of his telescope, "I see chimneys enough; but I see no smoke coming from them. They seem to me to be mute monuments raised to a dead industry." The artist had quite forgotten to put the smoke in. Perhaps he painted from nature—some artists do. Dogvane was quite equal to the occasion, "We compel all your subjects, sir, to consume their own smoke."
This of course was not the case, if it had been, the Buccaneer's people would not have had to live at times in a gloom that made mid-day scarcely distinguishable from midnight.
Do I accuse a high official; a man whose character was as that of the wife of Cæsar, of not adhering to the truth?
Heaven forbid, that we should be so profane. But even truth at times must be suppressed, and though this may be considered by the straight-laced and sickly minded to be lying by implication, it is not so. It is done in the very best and most pious society; and in a high state of civilization it is absolutely necessary; because truth hurts the feelings of the refined.
The tinkling of many bells rose up on the air, and hovered for a while over the crow's nest. "What sound is that?" asked the Buccaneer. "The bell wethers, sir, ringing out their glad tidings of large and multiplying flocks." It was nothing of the sort. It was the muffin man going his constant and monotonous rounds.
"Listen, sir!" exclaimed Dogvane in high glee, "to the merry, but perfectly unintelligible cry of your happy costermongers. From dewy morn till dewy eve they vend their wares."
"If their cry, Master Dogvane, is unintelligible, why allow them to disturb the quiet of my people?"
"For all that I do, sir, there is a goodly reason. One of the favourite cries of our enemies is that we are revolutionists, up-setters, and destroyers of cherished customs. We refute this base slander by pointing to your costermongers. Here is a time-honoured institution that we have left untouched, and if the merry voice of the costermonger is to be silenced the guilt shall be on the head of the Port Watch, for old Bill Dogvane will have nothing to do with it." After this burst of impassioned eloquence the captain of the Starboard Watch wiped a glistening tear from his eye, took a little time to get his breath and then continued: "Look at your sanitary arrangements! In a matter of drains you have not an equal."
"All this is very well, Master Dogvane, and at home things may be sound enough; but how about my neighbours?"