Soon I heard an ecstatic cry, "My dear, I distinctly smelt spice
then!" Another turn, and another jubilant exclamation: "It's quite
true about the spicy breezes. I got a delicious whiff just then.
Who would have thought that they would have carried so far out to
sea?" A sceptical elderly gentleman was summoned from below, and
he, after a while, was reluctantly forced to avow that he, too,
had noticed the spicy fragrance. No wonder! when I had about a
quarter of a pound of grated nutmeg in one hand, and as much
pounded cinnamon in the other. Now these people will go on
declaring to the end of their lives that they smelt the spicy
odours of Ceylon a full hundred miles out at sea, just as the
travelling M.P. will assert that a tree in India produces a very
good imitation of red wine. It is a nice point determining how far
one is morally responsible oneself for the unconscious falsehoods
into which these people have been betrayed. I should like to have
had the advice of Mrs. Fairchild, of the Fairchild Family upon
this delicate question. I feel convinced that that estimable lady,
with her inexhaustible repertory of supplications, would instantly
have recited by heart "a prayer against the temptation to lead
others into uttering untruths unconsciously," which would have met
the situation adequately, for not once in the book, when appealed
to, did she fail to produce a lengthy and elaborately worded
petition, adapted to the most unexpected emergencies, and I feel
confident that her moral armoury would have included a prayer
against tendencies to "leg-pulling.
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