“By Gog, your Highness!” cried he, “here’s the pressman for our money. To make the Navy popular, quotha--give them stomach for it! Aye, why not? And lace our sails with silver twist, and hang a silken tassel at the main, and pipe to quarters on a hurdy-gurdy! O, we’ll have our Captain’s monkey yet with lovelocks to his head and white ribbons to his shoon!” His lordship, on whom this pickaxe had wrought at last, flushed up to the eyes with anger and resentment. He rose to his feet. “Thith monthtruth inthult,” he began; “I crave your Highnetheth grath----” and stuck for lack of words. The Duke, whose cue was nothing if not propitiation, turned in some genuine wrath on the seaman. “You forget yourself, sir,” he said sternly. “You will favour me by retiring. Waiving the question of respect for his lordship’s opinions, you fail in it to me, who invited them. Nor need you be so cocksure in your own. Who knows what inclinations might have served us but for dread of that malady! You must go.” The Captain, not venturing to remonstrate, but seeing, as he thought, through the other’s motive, obeyed, and so much without rancour that he could not forbear some subdued sputtering laughter as he left the room--an ebullition which, in fact, found its secret response in the Duke’s own bosom. He addressed himself, the man gone, with a rather twinkling blandishment to his remaining guest. “A rough, untutored fellow, my lord; but reliable, according to his lights. They are not penetrating, perhaps; yet clear as regards the surface of things. You must forgive him. That was an original suggestion of yours. He would not grasp its inner significance, naturally. To cure sea-sickness, now. There is something in it.” “I am happy,” minced the bantling, “in your Highnetheth commendation. That _mal-de-mer_ is a very dithtrething thing. It maketh a man look a fool; and a man dothn’t like to look a fool.” The Duke considered. “But for the character of the remedy? What do you say to music? Music will not, according to Master George Herbert, cure the toothache: but is sea-sickness the toothache, my lord?” “Not the toothache; no, Thir.” “Is it not rather, by all reports, a surging or vertigo of the brain, induced by that reversal of the laws of equilibrium which transposes the offices, as it were, of matter animate and matter inanimate?” “I--I take your Highnetheth word for it.” “Why, it is clear. We are designed and organized, are we not, to be voluntary agents on a plane of stability?” “Yeth, yeth, O yeth!” “Very well. So we lie down or rise at will, the solid earth abetting. But supposing the parts reversed, ourselves the willingly quiescent, the earth the one to rise or fall? Would not our brain, devised on the opposite principle, be naturally upset, carrying with it the stomach, its most intimate relation?” “I’m thure it would; quite thure to be thure.”