ming a
raft. On a stool in the center of it--not, apparently navigating it, but
rather with the subdued and dignified bearing of a passenger, sat
Captain Abersouth, of the _Nupple-duck_, reading a novel.

Our meeting was not cordial. He remembered me as a man of literary taste
superior to his own and harbored resentment, and although he made no
opposition to my taking passage with him I could see that his
acquiescence was due rather to his muscular inferiority than to the
circumstance that I was damp and taking cold. Merely acknowledging his
presence with a nod as I climbed abroad, I seated myself and inquired if
he would care to hear the concluding stanzas of "Naseby Fight."

"No," he replied, looking up from his novel, "no, Claude Reginald Gump,
writer of sea stories, I've done with you. When you sank the
_Nupple-duck_ some days ago you probably thought that you had made an
end of me. That was clever of you, but I came to the surface and
followed the other ship--the one on which you escaped. It was I that the
sailor saw from the masthead. I saw him see me. It was for me that all
that stuff was hove overboard. Good--I made it into this raft. It was, I
think, the next day that I passed the floating body of a man whom I
recognized as, my old friend Billy Troutbeck--he used to be a cook on a
man-o'-war. It gives me pleasure to be the means of saving your life,
but I eschew you. The moment that we reach port our paths part. You
remember that in the very first sentence of this story you began to
drive my ship, the _Nupple-duck_, on to a reef of coral."

I was compelled to confess that this was true, and he continued his
inhospitable reproaches:

"Before you had written half a column you sent her to the bottom, with
me and the crew. But _you_--you escaped."

"That is true," I replied; "I cannot deny that the facts are correctly
stated."

"And in a story before that, you took me and my mates of the ship
_Camel_ into the heart of the South Polar Sea and left us frozen dead in
the ice, like flies in amber. But you did not leave yourself there--you
escaped."

"Really, Captain," I said, "your memory is singularly accurate,
considering the many hardships that you have had to undergo; many a man
would have gone mad."

"And a long time before that," Captain Abersouth resumed, after a pause,
more, apparently, to con his memory than to enjoy my good opinion of it,
"you lost me at sea--look here; I didn't read anything but Ge