maica in the West Indies and----

"--return?" finishes our stevedore. "Sure you returned each time? 'N' in
what sortivver craft'd you sail to them places--and return--in?"

"Why, steamers," answers the lecturer.

"Passinjer?"

"Passenger? Certainly."

"Excuse _me_!" says our stevedore. "I oughter known better. O' course,
_you know_ all about sailors," and sits down.

The lecturer was all right. He was doing the best he knew, with the
finest and fattest of words he could pick out, to make things clearer to
his audience; and his audience, appreciating that, let him run on, until
he said that there was not one mysterious thing which had ever happened
that could fail to be proved very ordinary by mathematical, or
historical, or logical, or physical, or some other "cal" deduction;
which bounced our watch-dog out of his seat again.

"How d'you 'count," he growls, "for th' _Orion_ 'n' _Sirius_?"

Well-l, he could not account for it, for the simple and overwhelmingly
conclusive reason that, previous to that very moment, he had never heard
of the ships named.

"Then s'pose you hear 'f 'em now," says our stevedore, and starts in and
delivers the lecturer a lecture on the _Orion_ and _Sirius_, and it
wound up the show; for when the lecturer started to butt in, all the old
barnacles, who before this had been clinging warily to the edge of their
seats, now rose up and rallied around our stevedore to finish his
story, which he did; and the old fellows, on leaving the hall, said that
the credit of the proceeds for the Sailor's Haven fund, for that night,
anyway, ought to go as much to their old college chum from the coal
wharf as to any imported lecturer with his deckload of lantern slides.

But our stevedore didn't tell all there was of the _Orion_ and the
_Sirius_. The lecturer went home thinking he had been told all about it,
but he hadn't. Here it is as it was.

I

In the fleet of big coal schooners, which at this time were running from
the middle Atlantic ports to Boston, the twin five-masters, the _Orion_
and the _Sirius_, were notable.

They were twins in everything: built from the one set of moulds in the
one yard at the one time, launched together, rigged together, sailed on
their maiden trips together, and were brought home with their first
cargoes of coal together by two masters who were almost as twinlike to
look at as their vessels.

It was the history of these two big schooners, that they seemed always