He was quite tranquil in the maternal propinquity of his hostess, albeit a little uneasy as to his reticence about the Indian.
"Kla'uns," said Susy, relieving a momentary pause, in her highest voice, "knows how to speak.

Speak, Kla'uns!" It appearing from Clarence's blushing explanation that this gift was not the ordinary faculty of speech, but a capacity to recite verse, he was politely pressed by the company for a performance.
"Speak 'em, Kla'uns, the boy what stood unto the burnin' deck, and said, 'The boy, oh, where was he ?'" said Susy, comfortably lying down on Mrs.
Peyton's lap, and contemplating her bare knees in the air.

"It's 'bout a boy," she added confidentially to Mrs.Peyton, "whose father wouldn't never, never stay with him on a burnin' ship, though he said, 'Stay, father, stay,' ever so much." With this clear, lucid, and perfectly satisfactory explanation of Mrs.Hemans's "Casabianca," Clarence began.

Unfortunately, his actual rendering of this popular school performance was more an effort of memory than anything else, and was illustrated by those wooden gestures which a Western schoolmaster had taught him.

He described the flames that "roared around him," by indicating with his hand a perfect circle, of which he was the axis; he adjured his father, the late Admiral Casabianca, by clasping his hands before his chin, as if wanting to be manacled in an attitude which he was miserably conscious was unlike anything he himself had ever felt or seen before; he described that father "faint in death below," and "the flag on high," with one single motion.