board from that day to the present. But once upon a time three
people spent a very happy night on her deck, as you shall hear.
She is called _The Gleaner_.

I think I was never so much annoyed in my life as on the day when
Annie, my only servant, gave me a month's "warning." That was four
years ago; and she gave up cooking for me to marry a young watchmaker
down at the town--a youth of no mark save for a curious distortion of
the left eyebrow (due to much gazing through a circular glass into
the bowels of watches), a frantic assortment of religious
convictions, a habit of playing the fiddle in hours of ease, and an
absurd name--Tubal Cain Bonaday. I noticed that Annie softened it to
"Tubey."

Of course I tried to dissuade her, but my arguments were those of a
wifeless man, and very weak. She listened to them with much
patience, and went off to buy her wedding-frock. She was a plain
girl, without a scintilla of humour; and had just that sense of an
omelet that is vouchsafed to one woman in a generation.

So she and Tubal Cain were married at the end of the month, and
disappeared on their honeymoon, no one quite knew whither. They went
on the last day of April.


At half-past eight in the evening of May 6th I had just finished my
seventh miserable dinner. My windows were open to the evening, and
the scent of the gorse-bushes below the terrace hung heavily
underneath the verandah and stole into the room where I sat before
the white cloth, in the lamp-light. I had taken a cigarette and was