on the floor until I took compassion on him and rolled him on the lounge.  Talk about your wifely devotion, what!  I count the roll in the morning before I slip it to the purser for safekeeping and it assayed $1,245, which is not half bad for a night’s work.

“The wise guys come around and offer Wilbur $100 a night to stay out of the smoking room and he won’t do it, but tells them if he catches them playing another game during the trip he will turn loose the long Rebel yell.  Now the two wise guys are sitting on deck reading ‘The Lives of the Saints’ and making faces at Wilbur every time he goes romping by.  Ain’t Wilbur the saucy thing?

“The last night on board we gave a concert for the benefit of the Seamen’s Fund, or something like that, and I claim that it was a classy affair.  I appeared, and without any brag or ostentation I can truthfully say that I scored a great personal triumph.  It wasn’t so much what I did, but the winsome manner in which I did it.  Get that?  Wilbur was the manager of the affair and didn’t shake down a cent.

“What do you think of that?  He said that a sailor needed all the money he could get and he would be the first man not to take it from them.  I made my big hit at the concert in reciting ‘Lasca.’  One of the mates told me that somebody does ‘Lasca’ on every trip, but I was the first one that furnished scenery by letting down my hair.  I wonder if he was kidding me?

“A great many of the ladies on board spent all their time in playing Bridget whist, and after watching them for a couple of afternoons they offered to teach me the game with a moderate limit.  I am hep to this poker thing and can look a pat hand in the face without a quiver of the lip, but I must blushingly admit that I thought I was in for a good old-fashioned trimming when I got up against those dames.  It cost me about fifty dollars to learn, and then I had a streak of beginner’s luck, and before the whistle blew for dinner I was several hundred to the velvet.

“Two of the Janes put up a horrible holler about it being a friendly game and wanted their money back.  I was going to give it to them, because I didn’t want ’em to look any older, but one of the others took my part and told me to hold onto the gross.  The three that didn’t get their’s back got out their little hammers and for a while I had no one to talk to but myself or Wilbur, and he was trying to dope out a scheme whereby he could paste threesheets on the ocean and catch the incoming tourists.  I left him trying to compose a one-word wireless that would explain the whole proposition to Fred Thompson.

“We came in sight of England or Ireland, or some of those foolish islands, early in the morning, and they didn’t look so much.  Barren Island has got ’em faded for smell.  There were nothing but long white chalk cliffs that a good man with a bucket of whitewash could