'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 Freischutz:

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.

And then I wondered if I would say it forward, and I thought I did.

Well, no sooner had I got to WORLD WITHOUT END, than I saw a man in a

pariu, and with a mat under his arm, come along the beach from the town.

He was rather a hard-favoured old party, and he limped and crippled, and

all the time he kept coughing. At first I didn't cotton to his looks,

The Ebb-Tide