do the funny business. I think one of you other parties might
wake up. Tell a fellow something.'

'The trouble is we've nothing to tell, my son,' returned the
captain.

'I'll tell you, if you like, what I was thinking,' said Herrick.

'Tell us anything,' said the clerk, 'I only want to be reminded
that I ain't dead.'

Herrick took up his parable, lying on his face and speaking
slowly and scarce above his breath, not like a man who has
anything to say, but like one talking against time.

'Well, I was thinking this,' he began: 'I was thinking I lay on
Papeete beach one night--all moon and squalls and fellows
coughing--and I was cold and hungry, and down in the mouth, and
was about ninety years of age, and had spent two hundred and
twenty of them on Papeete beach. And I was thinking I wished I
had a ring to rub, or had a fairy godmother, or could raise
Beelzebub. And I was trying to remember how you did it. I knew
you made a ring of skulls, for I had seen that in the
Freischultz: and that you took off your coat and turned up your
sleeves, for I had seen Formes do that when he was playing
Kaspar, and you could see (by the way he went about it) it was a
business he had studied; and that you ought to have something to
kick up a smoke and a bad smell, I dare say a cigar might do, and
that you ought to say the Lord's Prayer backwards. Well, I
wondered if I could do that; it seemed rather a feat, you see.