proportions.

"Awaiting incessantly a slight attention on your part,

"CAPTAIN ERNESTO BECUCCI."

And here, like one of George Moore's realistic studies, ends this
intercourse with Captain Ernesto Becucci. Nothing happened. Nothing
ever came to anything. He got no tangible return, and I got no leopard
skins. The tangible return he might have got, I presented to Eliceo, who
promptly invested it in a pair of trousers and a ticket to the
bull-fight.

(NOTE TO EDITOR.--This is a faithful narration of what actually happened
in Quito, Ecuador.)




THAT DEAD MEN RISE UP NEVER


The month in which my seventeenth birthday arrived I signed on before the
mast on the _Sophie Sutherland_, a three-topmast schooner bound on a
seven-months' seal-hunting cruise to the coast of Japan. We sailed from
San Francisco, and immediately I found confronting me a problem of no
inconsiderable proportions. There were twelve men of us in the
forecastle, ten of whom were hardened, tarry-thumbed sailors. Not alone
was I a youth and on my first voyage, but I had for shipmates men who had
come through the hard school of the merchant service of Europe. As boys,