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 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, I thought, and then I got sorry for the old soul because he coughed so hard.