At this point the conversation turned to my recently acquired botanical education, and I proposed a foraging trip to the Island for poisonous plants. "On the way, we can provide a proper ceremony for Long Lucy," said Mr. Birdsong. We set her up in the prow of a piroge and positioned her befeathered hat on her head at a jaunty angle, as she would have worn it. It's plume waved in the breeze as we rowed off a few miles to Buttonhole Cove, where the sharks were notorious for their legion and voracity.

He pulled the wavy blade from his cane and gently nipped off her ears, then cast one to each side of the piroge. When fins began to plane through the water, we slipped her overboard. The sight of the explosive frenzy would have delighted her to the very core. Mr Birdsong delivered a speech, gesturing broadly with his cane as the water churned; it was laced with references to the Odyssy, and there was an aside to me about what a salubrious read it would be. Then he wound on for a bit about William of Ockham and how things had no essences, but were only individuals, and how Long Lucy was like a sweet wind what had stopped blowing, or a wave that had crashed onto the shore. We wept and the boat rocked as sharks thumped it from beneath. Willie flew in circles above the roiling water and began to recite what might have been a poem (for it rhymed at regular intervals) in the tongue of the light people.

Landsmen will never have as fine and proper a way of honoring their dead. Let the Papists and the Calvinists and the rest of the religious lot have their tame ceremonies with their blood metaphorical; good Mr. Birdsong had officiated these obsequies in a style surpassing their noblest divines, and at a damned sight better speed, even figuring in his speechifying. An Aztec queen could have had no better sendoff.

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