"The river," remarked the Vice, between puffs, "is narrowing--every mile. Suppose it--should keep on--doing it for--fifty miles more; it--would close entirely before--it reached the--ow!--(here the flame of the match reached the Vice's fingers)--reached St.--the devil, oh!" for the Vice had dropped the still blazing fragment upon his bare foot. "No such saint in any calendar but that of politics," said the Cook reprovingly. "The St. Lawrence, I meant, of course," said the Vice: "the devil isn't recognized by _any_ party at all." "I suppose not," answered the Cook, who had dropped into a dreamy reverie. "The true workers in this world are never recognized by those who are most entirely dependent upon them." "You're begging the question," exclaimed the Vice, examining his scorched instep. "An apology in the shape of your flask of olive oil will be satisfactory. How _do_ you explain the river's shrinking, any how?" "Why, it's growing deeper, and as there's only a given amount of water, it can't occupy more space in one direction without narrowing in another. It's a precedent you might safely follow in politics." The Vice reflected for a moment; then a sweet smile irradiated his features, his left eye closed, his right forefinger was slowly laid athwart his nose, and he replied, "I knew that long ago, my boy; it's the mainstay of the business--the system, I mean. Let the party broaden, and 'Othello's occupation's gone.'" But the Cook, having relieved his mind of chaff which nevertheless carried (unknown to him) a grain of wheat, determined to inflict upon some one else the questioning to which he had been subjected, so he speedily overhauled the other Chrysalid containing the Purser, and demanded the reason of the river's narrowing. The Purser abruptly ceased patching a sonnet which he had scribbled upon the blade of a spare paddle, and answered, "The water-drops, so long united, have a premonition of the doom of separation soon to befall them, and they cling more closely to each other, for a last fond interchange of sentiment." "Water is not compressible by its own volition," promptly replied the Cook, who loved cyclopedias, and never knew sentiment when he encountered it. But the Purser, who hated questions so intensely that, had he lived in the time of that vigorous old interrogation point yclept Socrates, would have tramped a thousand miles for hemlock rather than have left the sage unpoisoned, ran ashore to avenge himself upon the Commodore, who had beached his boat to await the coming up of his lagging fleet. To the commanding officer the Purser put the disturbing question as to the cause of the narrowing of the river, and with the following result: "Rivers shrink toward their natural channel for the same reason that capitalists take to government bonds--because their banks are slippery, and suffer by the many rushes upon them."