The game was finally discontinued, owing to a shortage of checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows.  I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects.  In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor that I was forced to retire behind the protecting pages of a 1913 issue of “The Farmer’s Wife Indispensable Companion,” where I managed to lose myself for the time in a rather complicated exposition of how to tell which chicken laid what egg if any or something to that effect, an article that utterly demolished the moral character of the average hen, leaving her hardly a leg to roost on.

May 8th. “Give away,” said the coxswain to-day, when we were struggling to get our cutter off from the pier, and I gave away to such an extent, in fact, that I suddenly found myself balanced cleverly on the back of my neck in the bottom of the boat, so that I experienced the rather odd sensation of feeling the hot sun on the soles of my feet.  This procedure, of course, did not go unnoticed.  Nothing I do goes unnoticed, save the good things.  The coxswain made a few comments which showed him to be a thoroughly ill-bred person, but further than this I was not persecuted.  After we had rowed interminable distances through leagues upon leagues of doggedly resisting water a man in the bow remarked casually that he had several friends in Florida we might call upon if we kept it up a little longer, but the coxswain comfortably ensconced upon the hackamatack, was so deeply engrossed in the perusal of a vest pocket edition of the “Merchant of Venice” that he failed to grasp the full meaning of the remark.  I lifted my rapidly glazing eyes with no little effort from the keelson and discovered to my horror that we had hardly passed more than half a mile of shore-line at the most.  What we had been doing all the time I was unable to figure out.  I thought we had been rowing.  I could have sworn we had been rowing, but apparently we had not.  I looked up from my meditation in time to catch the ironical gaze of the coxswain upon me, and I involuntarily braced myself to the assault.

[Illustration:  “THE PROCEDURE, OF COURSE, DID NOT GO UNNOTICED”]

“Say, there, sailor,” said he, with a slow, unpleasant drawl, “you’re not rowing; you’re weaving.  It’s fancy work you’re doing, blast yer eyes!”

All who had sufficient strength left in them laughed jeeringly at this wise observation, but I retained a dignified silence—­that is, so far as a man panting from exhaustion can be silent.  At this moment we passed a small boat being rowed briskly along by a not unattractive girl.

“Now, watch her,” said the coxswain, helpfully, to me; “study the way that poor fragile girl, that mere child, pulls the oars, and try to do likewise.”