"
"If," said Mr. Badcock, in an injured tone and with a dark glance aft
at Captain Pomery, "if a man don't _like_ my playing, he has only to
say so. I don't press it on any one. From all I ever heard, art is
a matter of taste. But I don't understand a man's being suddenly
upset by a tune that, only yesterday, he couldn't hear often enough."
Out of the little logic I had picked up at Oxford I tried to explain
to him the process known as _sorites_; and suggested that Captain
Pomery, while tolerant of "I attempt from Love's sickness to fly" up
to the hundredth repetition, might conceivably show signs of tiring
at the hundred-and-first. Yet in my heart I mistrusted my own
argument, and my wonder at the skipper's conduct increased when, the
next dawn finding us still becalmed, but with the added annoyance of
a fog that almost hid the bowsprit's end, his demeanour swung back to
joviality. I taxed him with this, in my father's hearing.
"I make less account of fogs than most men," he answered. "I can
smell land; which is a gift and born with me. But this is no weather
to be caught in anywhere near the Sallee coast; and if we're to lose
the wind, let's have a good fog to hide us, I say.
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