from a goblet a prodigious draught
of water. 'Hold!' cried he angrily; 'you may eat instead; but putrid
or sulphureous water, you have heard, may produce the plague, and
honest men be the sufferers by your folly and intemperance.' They
assured him the water was tasteless, and very excellent, and had been
kept cool in the same kind of earthern jars as the wine. He tasted it,
and lost his patience. It was better, he protested, than any wine in
the world. They begged his acceptance of the jar containing it. But
the master, who had witnessed at a distance the whole proceeding, now
advanced, and, placing his hand against it, said sternly, 'Let him
have his own.' Usually, when he had emptied the second bottle, a
desire of converting the Mohammedans came over him: and they showed
themselves much less obstinate and refractory than they are generally
thought. He selected those for edification who swore the oftenest and
the loudest by the Prophet; and he boasted in his heart of having
overcome, by precept and example, the stiffest tenet of their
abominable creed. Certainly they drank wine, and somewhat freely. The
canonico clapped his hands, and declared that even some of the
apostles had been more pertinacious recusants of the faith.

_Eugenius._ Did he so? Cappari! I would not have made him a bishop for
twice the money if I had known it earlier. Could not he have left them
alone? Suppose one or other of them did doubt and persecute, was he
the man to blab it out among the heathen?

_Filippo._ A judgment, it appears, fell on him for so doing. A very
quiet sailor, who had always declined his invitations, and had always
heard his arguments at a distance and in silence, being pressed and
urged by him, and reproved somewhat arrogantly and loudly, as less
docile than his messmates, at last lifted up his leg behind him,
pulled off his right slipper, and counted deliberately and distinctly
thirty-nine sound strokes of the same, on the canonico's broadest
tablet, which (please your Holiness) might be called, not inaptly,
from that day the tablet of memory. In vain he cried out. Some of the
mariners made their moves at chess and waved their left hands as if
desirous of no interruption; others went backward and forward about
their business, and took no more notice than if their messmate was
occupied in caulking a seam or notching a flint. The master himself,
who saw the operation, heard the complaint in the evening, and lifted
up his sh