day, anyway--look at them Northern Spy apples, Mr. Trenholm!"

He wanted to forget the _Kut Sang_ and the awful night we had in her. He
imagined he didn't figure to advantage in the story, and he winced when
I mentioned certain events, although I always insisted that he was the
bravest man among us, having a better realization of the odds against us.
Those who have faced danger know it takes a brave man to admit that he is
beaten, and still keep up the fight.

We all have better memories for our brave moments than for the fear which
threatened for a time to prove us cowards. The man who has faced death
and says he was not afraid is either a fool or a liar; and, if only a
liar, still a fool for telling himself that which he knows to be a lie.
The bravery of the seaman is that he fears the sea and knows its
ruthlessness and its ultimate victory, and accepts it as a part of his
day's work. This is a sea-story.

Captain Riggs had log-book stories that were good, and they might have
served him for a volume of marine memoirs. But I was with him when
we freighted the _Kut Sang_ with adventure and sailed out of Manila, so
his musty records of rescues and wrecks lacked life for me. In the old
logbooks I found no men to compare with the Rev. Luther Meeker; or
Petrak, the little red-headed beggar; or Long Jim or Buckrow or Thirkle.
I never found in their pages a cabin-boy like Rajah the Malay, strutting
about with a long kris stuck in the folds of his scarlet _sarong_, or a
mate whose truculence equalled the chronic ill-humour of Harris, who
learned his seamanship as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks. And in
all his log-books I never found another Devil's Admiral!

Riggs is dead, and I can tell the story in my own way; for tell it I