When the action of the piece begins the boy stands on the burning
deck whence all but him had fled. You see, everyone else aboard
had had sense enough to beat it, but he stuck because his father
had posted him there. There was no good purpose he might serve
by sticking, except to furnish added material for the poetess, but
like the leather-headed young imbecile that he was he stood there
with his feet getting warmer all the time, while the flame that
lit the battle's wreck shone round him o'er the dead. After which:

There came a burst of thunder sound;
The boy--oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds, that far around
With fragments strewed the sea--

Ask the waves. Ask the fragments. Ask Mrs. Hemans. Or, to save
time, inquire of me.

He has become totally extinct. He is no more and he never was
very much. Still we need not worry. Mentally he must have been
from the very outset a liability rather than an asset. Had he
lived, undoubtedly he would have wound up in a home for the
feeble-minded. It is better so, as it is--better that he should
be spread about over the surface of the ocean in a broad general
way, thus saving all the expense and trouble of gathering him up
and burying him and putting a tombstone over him. He was one of
the incurables.

Once upon a time, writing a little piece on another subject, I
advanced the claim that the champion half-wit of all poetic
anthology was Sweet Alice, who, as described by Mr. English,