lls disaster for other people.
Liberty is a grand thing, in theory, and within certain well-defined
limits; but when it becomes licence--as it is very apt to do--it is a
bad thing for all concerned."

"Well, sir, you may be right, or you may be wrong, I don't know, never
havin' had any eddication. But Mr Wilde, he's an eddicated man, and
he's all for liberty and equality; and I don't mind sayin' as I prefers
his notions to yours."

"Very well," I said; "go your own way, Polson, since go you will. But I
wouldn't mind betting the sailorman's favourite wager--a farthing's
worth of silver spoons--that before another year has passed over your
head you will alter your tune. Take care that you do not defer the
alteration until it is too late and the mischief has become
irrevocable."

Now it happened that Wilde was, among a great many other things, a
stanch teetotaller; he was also an excessively nervous person. When he,
with the rest of the emigrants, came on deck after dinner upon this
particular day, and heard the maudlin, drunken singing in the
forecastle, and furthermore recognised that the ship was, for the time
being at least, without a crew, he fell into a tremendous rage, and,
rushing forward, precipitated himself into the forecastle, where,
believing that the crew, drunk, would accord to him the same reverential
attention that they were wont to do when sober, he proceeded to reproach
and revile them in no measured terms for their lapse from virtue,
actually going to the length, before anybody could stop him, of smashing
half a dozen bottles of Schiedam that he caught sight of snugly stowed
away in a bunk. So long as he confined himself to merely verbal
remonstrance and abuse the men listened to him with the vacuous, good-
humoured smile of intoxication, occasionally interrupting him with an
invitation to join them in their bacchanalian orgy; but when he took
what they deemed a base advantage of their good nature, by smashing the
bottles and wasting the liquor that one of the revellers had
incautiously revealed to him in support of the jovial invitation, their
good humour suddenly evaporated, and, staggering to their feet in
indignation, they would probably have done the man a serious injury had
they been capable of following him up on deck, whither he precipitately
fled. Then, having learned, during his brief visit to the forecastle,
that the carpenter was the chief culprit, he rushed into the latter's
cabin