urn to make sure. I remember it distinctly."

"Made fast?" the Captain snarled back, for the benefit of the watch as
it struggled to capture the flying sail before it tore to ribbons. "You
couldn't make your grandmother fast, you useless hell's scullion. If
you made that sheet fast with an extra turn, why in hell didn't it stay
fast? That's what I want to know. Why in hell didn't it stay fast?"

The mate whined inarticulately.

"Oh, shut up!" was the final word of Captain Cullen.

Half an hour later he was as surprised as any when the body of George
Dorety was found inside the companionway on the floor. In the afternoon,
alone in his room, he doctored up the log.

"Ordinary seaman, Karl Brun," he wrote, "lost overboard from
foreroyal-yard in a gale of wind. Was running at the time, and for the
safety of the ship did not dare come up to the wind. Nor could a boat
have lived in the sea that was running."

On another page, he wrote

"Had often warned Mr. Dorety about the danger he ran because of his
carelessness on deck. I told him, once, that some day he would get his
head knocked off by a block. A carelessly fastened mainstaysail sheet
was the cause of the accident, which was deeply to be regretted because
Mr. Dorety was a favourite with all of us."

Captain Dan Cullen read over his literary effort with admiration,
blotted the page, and closed the log. He lighted a cigar and stared
before him. He felt the Mary Rogers lift, and heel, and surge along,
and knew that she was making nine knots. A smile of satisfaction slowly
dawned on his black and hairy face. Well, anyway, he had made his
westing and fooled God.

SEMPER IDEM

Doctor Bicknell was in a remarkably gracious mood. Through a minor
accident, a slight bit of carelessness, that was all, a man who might
have pulled through had died the preceding night. Though it had been
only a sailorman, one of the innumerable unwashed, the steward of the
receiving hospital had been on the anxious seat all the morning. It was
not that the man had died that gave him discomfort, he knew the Doctor
too well for that, but his distress lay in the fact that the operation
had been done so well. One of the most delicate in surgery, it had been
as successful as it was clever and audacious. All had then depended upon
the treatment, the nurses, the steward. And the man had died. Nothing
much, a bit of carelessness, yet enough to bring the professional wrath
of Doctor Bicknell