A Man Who
Carries A Musical-Box Is Always A Good-Natured Man.
Then there was his Grace, or his Grandeur, the Archbishop of
Beyrouth (in the parts of the infidels), His
Holiness's Nuncio to
the Court of Her Most Faithful Majesty, and who mingled among us
like any simple mortal, - except that he had an extra smiling
courtesy, which simple mortals do not always possess; and when you
passed him as such, and puffed your cigar in his face, took off his
hat with a grin of such prodigious rapture, as to lead you to
suppose that the most delicious privilege of his whole life was
that permission to look at the tip of your nose or of your cigar.
With this most reverend prelate was his Grace's brother and
chaplain - a very greasy and good-natured ecclesiastic, who, from
his physiognomy, I would have imagined to be a dignitary of the
Israelitish rather than the Romish Church - as profuse in smiling
courtesy as his Lordship of Beyrouth. These two had a meek little
secretary between them, and a tall French cook and valet, who, at
meal times, might be seen busy about the cabin where their
reverences lay. They were on their backs for the greater part of
the voyage; their yellow countenances were not only unshaven, but,
to judge from appearances, unwashed. They ate in private; and it
was only of evenings, as the sun was setting over the western wave,
and, comforted by the dinner, the cabin-passengers assembled on the
quarter-deck, that we saw the dark faces of the reverend gentlemen
among us for a while. They sank darkly into their berths when the
steward's bell tolled for tea.
At Lisbon, where we came to anchor at midnight, a special boat came
off, whereof the crew exhibited every token of reverence for the
ambassador of the ambassador of Heaven, and carried him off from
our company. This abrupt departure in the darkness disappointed
some of us, who had promised ourselves the pleasure of seeing his
Grandeur depart in state in the morning, shaved, clean, and in full
pontificals, the tripping little secretary swinging an incense-pot
before him, and the greasy chaplain bearing his crosier.
Next day we had another bishop, who occupied the very same berth
his Grace of Beyrouth had quitted - was sick in the very same way -
so much so that this cabin of the "Lady Mary Wood" is to be
christened "the bishop's berth" henceforth; and a handsome mitre is
to be painted on the basin.
Bishop No. 2 was a very stout, soft, kind-looking old gentleman, in
a square cap, with a handsome tassel of green and gold round his
portly breast and back. He was dressed in black robes and tight
purple stockings: and we carried him from Lisbon to the little
flat coast of Faro, of which the meek old gentleman was the chief
pastor.
We had not been half-an-hour from our anchorage in the Tagus, when
his Lordship dived down into the episcopal berth.
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