At this precise moment, Captain the Honourable Augustus Fitzroy
Fitzalban rushed from his cabin forward, attired in a rich flowered silk
morning-gown, in which scarlet predominated. He held a pistol cocked
in each hand; and, as he broke through the crowd, he bellowed forth
lustily, "Where's the ghost! let me see the ghost!" He was soon in the
van of the astonished gazers; but, disappointed Fitzalban! he saw no
ghost, because, as the man says in the Critic, "'twas not in sight."
Immediately the honourable captain had gained his station, the much
wronged and persecuted cow, galled by her wound, with a mortal effort
snapped the rope with which she was fastened, and then lowering her
horned head nearly level with the deck, and flourishing her tail
after the manner that an Irishman flourishes his shillelagh before he
commences occipital operations, she rushed upon the crowded phalanx
before her. At this instant, as if its supernatural mission had been
completed, the spirit vanished.
The ideal having decamped, those concerned had to save themselves from
the well followed up assaults of the real. The captain flew before the
pursuing horns, d--ning the cow in all the varieties of condemnation.
But she was generous, and she attached herself to him with an unwonted,
or rather an unwanted, fidelity. Lanterns were crushed and men
overthrown, and laughter now arose amidst the shouts of dismay. The
seamen tried to impede the progress of the furious animal by throwing
down before her lashed-up hammocks, and by seizing her behind by the
tail: but, woe is me! the Honourable the Captain Augustus Fitzroy
Fitzalban could not run so fast in his variegated and scarlet flowered
silk dressing-gown as a cow in the agonies of death; for he had just
reached that asylum of safety, his cabin-door, when the cow took him
up very carefully with her horns, and first giving him a monitory
shake, then with an inclination to port, she tossed him right over the
ward-room skylight, and deposited him very gingerly in the turtle-tub
that stood lashed on the larboard side of the half-deck. This exertion
was her last; for immediately alter falling upon her knees, and then
gently rolling over, to use an Homeric expression, her soul issued from
her wound, and sought the shades below appropriated to the souls of cows.
In the mean time, the captain was sprawling about, and contending with
his turtle for room, and he stood a very good chance of being drowned
even in a tub; but assistance speedily arriving, he was drawn out,
and thus the world was spared a second tale of a tub. But there was
something in the spirit of the aristocratic Fitzalban that neither
cows, ghosts, nor turtle-haunted water could subdue. Wet as he was, and
suffering also from the contusions of the cow's horns, he immediately
ordered more light, and proceeded to search for the ghost,--prolific
parent of all his mishaps.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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