I Forbid the Banns! — page 97: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XIV. ON THE KISS, ITER an extremely good dinner the passengers on the quarter-deck of an ocean steamship are disposed to be lenient critics of fiction. The two forms of this element which comes into prominence at sucha time are the experi- ences of the captain, narrated to an admiring circle, and the protestations of the young men to the maidens—sometimes, alas! to the matrons—as they sit together watching the stars appear in the sky. On the quarter-deck of the faehapee Castle the usual stories were being told. The captain had finished his cigar, and had placed himself unreservedly in the hands of two pretty little girls—they had pretty little mothers—so far as story-telling was concerned. Yes, he said, he had several times come into immediate contact with buccaneers off the Spanish Main, and the times that he had encountered pirates were really so numerous that he long ago ceased to remember any one in particular. Who was the funniest buccaneer that he had ever known? Well, really he could scarcely say at a moment’s notice who had been the funniest ; they had all developed such humor- ous characteristics it would be practically impossible to say to whom the palm for general fun should beawarded. For his own part he should feel compelled to decline making any invidious distinction between them, lest he might be doing an injustice to some worthy buccaneer of a sensitive nature. Were they usually sensitive? Oh, dear, yes. They were, as a rule, so ridiculously susceptible that their own bosom friends occasionally shrank from entering into 87 EOmichbooksnec