u answer me like
flags, banners, uhlans' pennons, fullfrocked cardinals!'

My father stepped in.

'Ah, yes,' said the margravine. 'But you little know, my good Roy, the
burden of an unmarried princess; and heartily glad shall I be to hand her
over to Baroness Turckems. That's her instituted governess, duenna,
dragon, what you will. She was born for responsibility, I was not; it
makes me miserable. I have had no holiday. True, while she was like one
of their wax virgins I had a respite. Fortunately, I hear of you English,
that when you fall to sighing, you suck your thumbs and are consoled.'

My father bowed her, and smiled her, and whirled her away from the
subject. I heard him say, under his breath, that he had half a mind to
issue orders for an allowance of grog to be served out to the sailors on
the spot. I suggested, as I conceived in a similar spirit the forcible
ducking of Mr. Peterborough. He appeared to entertain and relish the
notion in earnest.

'It might do. It would gratify her enormously,' he said, and eyed the
complacent clerical gentleman with transparent jealousy of his claims to
decent treatment. 'Otherwise, I must confess,' he added, 'I am at a loss.
My wits are in the doldrums.'

He went up to Mr. Peterborough, and, with an air of great sincerity and
courtesy, requested him in French to create a diversion for her Highness
the Margravine of Rippau during the extreme heat of the afternoon by
precipitating himself headlong into forty fathoms, either attached or
unattached. His art in baffling Mr. Peterborough's attempts to treat the
unheard-of request as a jest was extraordinary. The ingenuity of his
successive pleas for pressing such a request pertinaciously upon Mr.
Peterborough in particular, his fixed eye, yet cordial deferential
manner, and the stretch of his forefinger, and argumentative turn of the
head--indicative of an armed disputant fully on the alert, and as if it
were of profound and momentous importance that he should thoroughly
defeat and convince his man--overwhelmed us. Mr. Peterborough, not being
supple in French, fell back upon his English with a flickering smile of
protestation; but even in his native tongue he could make no head against
the tremendous volubility and brief eager pauses besetting him.

The farce was too evanescent for me to reproduce it.

Peterborough turned and fled to his cabin. Half the crew were on the
broad grin. The margravine sprang to my father's arm, an