JOHNNY (piously)
Marbles would bounce on Mr. Jones' bald head--
But I sha'n't try!
BOBBY
Do you know why Aunt Jane is always snarling
At you and me because we tells a lie,
And she don't slap that man that called her darling?
Do you know why?
JOHNNY
No more I don't, nor why that man with Mamma
Just kissed her hand.
BOBBY
She hurt it--and that's why;
He made it well, the very way that Mamma
Does do to I.
JOHNNY
I feel so sleepy. . . . Was that Papa kissed us?
What made him sigh, and look up to the sky?
BOBBY
We weren't downstairs, and he and God had missed us,
And that was why!
NOTES
THE LOST GALLEON. As the custom on which the central incident of
this legend is based may not be familiar to all readers, I will
repeat here that it is the habit of navigators to drop a day from
their calendar in crossing westerly the 180th degree of longitude of
Greenwich, adding a day in coming east; and that the idea of the
lost galleon had an origin as prosaic as the log of the first China
Mail Steamer from San Francisco. The explanation of the custom and
its astronomical relations belongs rather to the usual text-books
than to poetical narration. If any reader thinks I have overdrawn
the credulous superstitions of the ancient navigators, I refer him
to the veracious statements of Maldonado, De Fonte, the later
voyages of La Perouse and Anson, and the charts of 1640.
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