The peculiar title suggests something nautical and maybe, if we're lucky, even piratical, but in fact this brief short story (a mere fourteen pages) is set entirely on land. Its narrator is Scipio, an enslaved black boy in 18th-Century London, who serves as a page for his fashionable mistress. One evening, Scipio witnesses a concert performed at his mistress's house by two 'Prodigies of Nature': the young Mozart and his sister Nannerl, who are travelling with their father. Pressed upon to perform, Scipio falls short of expectations, but his fascination with the young 'Wolfi' persists and, when he has another chance to see the young genius at work, he leaps for it.

The title refers to a song that Scipio remembers from his voyage to England, but I wondered if it's also an allusion to different sorts of people: those with talents or dreams, like Mozart and Scipio, who fly on the imagination; and those less visionary (like Scipio's mistress), who demand that everything follows the rules. What's certain is that this is also a story about exploitation: the fact that both Scipio and Mozart are coddled and admired because they are children, and that both of them find their reception cooling as they grow older. Scipio becomes less of a luxury object that his mistress can show off, and more of a responsibility for her; while Mozart's brilliance is overshadowed, for the elegant ladies of society, by the fact that he's no longer an adorable bouncy little boy. It's an interesting snapshot but, as I said, very brief. One feels that there was so much story left to tell, and it's hard not to feel slightly hard-done-by, when other stories in this series average around the sixty-page mark. ( )