A MISCHIEVOUS MIDDY'S JOKE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 6063, 23 April 1881, Page 7

A MISCHIEVOUS MIDDY'S JOKE.

Dr. Foobd Clark, a young sea-going surgeon and an enthusiastic savant, arrived in San Francisco a short time since as the surgeon of the British ship John o' Gaunt. The ship ■was'from Calcutta. The voyage was long, and as it was so monotonous as not to furnish to the active intellect of the young surgeon all the phenomena that the savant could crave, one of the midshipmen determined to improvise some phenomona for him. At first he contemplated a sea-serpent, but as seaserpents are becoming very common, and are a good deal of trouble, he finally determined ou the electric light occasionally seen by xinusually tough shell-backs aloft in the rigging of ships at sea, and which is known as St. Elmo's fire. He got the mate's bull's-eye lantern, and on a very dark night he climbed aloft, lit it, and made it fast at the mast-head. Descending, he rushed into the cabin and announced to the doctor a. remarkably welldeveloped case of St. Elmo's light. The doctor' bounded on deck, examined the light, made a sketch of it, and finally the midshipman boldly volunteered to go up and interview it. He went up, blew the light out, and descending, told the doctor he had touched the flame with his finger, ■whereupon he instautly received a tremendous electric shock, and St. Elmo's light disappeared. Dr. Clark found the depraved young man's pulse at 102, so he put the midshipman's arm in a sling, put a whiskey sling into the midshipman, and put the midshipman and both slings into the sick bay, and thereafter, during the rest of the cruise, and as a premium innocently paid to a case of very atrocious wickedness, he prescribed to the young hero who had blown St. Elmo's light out of the mate's bull's-eye lantern daily rations of tobacco and Upon the arrival in this port of the John o' Gaunt, Dr. Clark wrote a very abstruse account of the matter, which was published in ah evening contemporary, and he also forwarded to the London Graphic a much more detailed account of the phenomenon, together with water-colour sketches of it which he had made. The doctor having subsequently sailed from this port as the surgeon of the Zealandia, Thomas Y. Powles, commander of the John o' Gaunt, to whose knowledge the perpetration of the joke had come, also in a communication to the evening.contemporary, "gives the whole business away," not to raise a guffaw at the expense of a young gentleman whose acquirements as a physician and as a scientist are admitted by both the bodies, but that the joke that the tedium of a long voyage and the excellence of its own inception and execution made pardonable may not serve as a false beacon for other scientists.—San Francisco Chronicle.