nd another relay of cigars and we lit up. 'Twas
Cap'n Eri that spoke first.

"Love's a queer disease, anyway," says he. "Ain't it, now? 'Twould
puzzle you and me to figger out what that Saunders girl see to like in
the Davidson critter. It must be a dreadful responsible thing to be so
fascinating. I never felt that responsibleness but once--except when I
got married, of course--and that was a good many years ago, when I was
going to sea on long v'yages, and was cruising around the East Indies,
in the latitude of our new troubles, the Philippines.

"I put in about three months on one of them little coral islands off
that way once. Hottest corner in the Lord's creation, I cal'late, and
the laziest and sleepiest hole ever I struck. All a feller feels like
doing in them islands is just to lay on his back under a palm tree all
day and eat custard-apples, and such truck.

"Way I come to be there was like this: I was fo'mast hand on a Boston
hooker bound to Singapore after rice. The skipper's name was Perkins,
Malachi C. Perkins, and he was the meanest man that ever wore a
sou'-wester. I've had the pleasure of telling him so sence--'twas in
Surinam 'long in '72. Well, anyhow, Perkins fed us on spiled salt junk
and wormy hard-tack all the way out, and if a feller dast to hint that
the same wa'n't precisely what you'd call Parker House fare, why the
skipper would knock him down with a marline-spike and the first mate
would kick him up and down the deck. 'Twan't a pretty performance to
look at, but it beat the world for taking the craving for fancy cooking
out of a man.

"Well, when I got to Singapore I was nothing but skin and bone, and
considerable of the skin had been knocked off by the marline-spike and
the mate's boots. I'd shipped for the v'yage out and back, but the first
night in port I slipped over the side, swum ashore, and never set eyes
on old Perkins again till that time in Surinam, years afterward.

"I knocked round them Singapore docks for much as a month, hoping to
get a berth on some other ship, but 'twan't no go. I fell in with a
Britisher named Hammond, 'Ammond, he called it, and as he was on the
same hunt that I was, we kept each other comp'ny. We done odd jobs now
'n' again, and slept in sailors' lodging houses when we had the price,
and under bridges or on hemp bales when we hadn't. I was too proud to
write home for money, and Hammond didn't have no home to write to, I
cal'late.

"But luck 'll turn if