four months before the voyage began, and advanced to me handsomely, yes,
bravely, handsomely."

"But tell me more, sir; I am most interested," Dag Daughtry concluded his
simple matter of the beer. "It's a good game. I might learn it for my
old age, though I give you my word, sir, I won't butt in on your game. I
wouldn't tackle it until you are gone, sir, good game that it is."

"First of all, you must pick out men with money--with plenty of money, so
that any loss will not hurt them. Also, they are easier to interest--"

"Because they are more hoggish," the steward interrupted. "The more
money they've got the more they want."

"Precisely," the Ancient Mariner continued. "And, at least, they are
repaid. Such sea-voyages are excellent for their health. After all, I
do them neither hurt nor harm, but only good, and add to their health."

"But them scars--that gouge out of your face--all them fingers missing on
your hand? You never got them in the fight in the longboat when the
bo's'n carved you up. Then where in Sam Hill did you get the them? Wait
a minute, sir. Let me fill your glass first." And with a fresh-brimmed
glass, Charles Stough Greanleaf narrated the history of his scars.

"First, you must know, steward, that I am--well, a gentleman. My name
has its place in the pages of the history of the United States, even back
before the time when they were the United States. I graduated second in
my class in a university that it is not necessary to name. For that
matter, the name I am known by is not my name. I carefully compounded it
out of names of other families. I have had misfortunes. I trod the
quarter-deck when I was a young man, though never the deck of the _Wide
Awake_, which is the ship of my fancy--and of my livelihood in these
latter days.

"The scars you asked about, and the missing fingers? Thus it chanced. It
was the morning, at late getting-up times in a Pullman, when the accident
happened. The car being crowded, I had been forced to accept an upper
berth. It was only the other day. A few years ago. I was an old man
then. We were coming up from Florida. It was a collision on a high
trestle. The train crumpled up, and some of the cars fell over sideways
and fell off, ninety feet into the bottom of a dry creek. It was dry,
though there was a pool of water just ten feet in diameter and eighteen
inches deep. All the rest was dry boulders, and I bull's-eyed that pool.

"This