LITTLE BUTTERCUP AND THE CAPTAIN
“Little Buttercup,” said Captain Corcoran, “it would be affectation to pretend that I do not understand your meaning. I am touched to the heart by your innocent regard for me, and were we differently situated, I think I could have returned it. As it is, I regret to say that I can be nothing to you but a friend.”
Little Buttercup, who always knew more about people than anybody else, knew a good deal of Captain Corcoran’s history, as will presently appear. He was not really Captain Corcoran, and she knew it. More than that, she knew who he really was, but it did not suit her to tell him just then. I believe that this mysterious Little Buttercup was able to prove, from the hidden depths of her miscellaneous information, that every human being alive was somebody else, and that no human being alive was what people really supposed him to be. Fortunately, she only revealed her knowledge bit by bit as it suited her, but it is terrible to think what an amount of confusion she might have created in highly respectable families if she had chosen to disclose all she knew at once.
Knowing who Captain Corcoran was, and how little reason he really had to plume himself on his superior position as a Captain in the Navy, Little Buttercup’s naturally hasty temper began to simmer. The gipsy blood that ran in her veins gave her a curious power of prophesying backwards. I mean that she could foretell what you were, and remember what you will be, which is quite unlike the usual kind of fortune-telling that comes of crossing a gipsy’s hand with a sixpence. She also possessed a remarkable power of expressing herself in rhyme without ever having to hunt for the last words of her lines, which gave a peculiar force and emphasis to her words, and convinced everybody that what she said was supernatural, and consequently true.
So, getting gradually more and more angry with Captain Corcoran for despising her, as she called it (though he was the last person in the world to despise anybody) she summoned her remarkable rhyming ability to her aid in the following utterances:
Things are seldom what they seem (said she)
Skim-milk masquerades as cream;
High-lows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacocks’ feathers.
Rhyming is rather infectious, so Captain Corcoran, catching the disease, replied (rather puzzled)