riend? Vot is der madder mit
der lightness."

He fumbled again. Nickie was in no hurry, he had the gin bottle.

Schmitz found the matches, and lit a candle on the shelf. He turned
drunkenly towards Nickie, and beheld what must have been a strange and
mysterious sight to a commonplace Dutchman in his own home. Sitting on a
chair facing him, with the gin bottle raised to his lips, was a mighty
monkey--a great, red, hairy ape, as large as a man.

The publican scratched his head wonderingly.

"Mein gracious!" he said.

"Dot iss a sdrange ting dot haff happened mit you, Sharlie," he said, in
a wondering, small voice.

"Sharlie!" he called. "Sharlie!" The Missing Link gave no reply.

"Pless mein soul!" gasped the Dutchman.

Suddenly a gleam of intelligence shot through the publican's boosy gloom.
He pointed a finger straight at Nickie, lurched towards him, crossed the
room in a stagger, and drove his inquiring digit against the mysterious
visitor. The mysterious visitor was solid.

Schmitz was beaten.

"Sharlie," he said, "is it true dot you vos, or is it true dot you
aind't?"

Nickie offered him the bottle in a friendly way, and Schmitz took it and
drank. The draught seemed to abolish all problems.

"Now ye make dot night, Sharlie," said Schmitz. He staggered into the
bar, and returned with an armful of bottles--all full of liquor. With the
adroitness of an expert he knocked the head off a bottle of schnapps.
"Dot is for you, Sharlie," he explained. The Missing Link assumed
possession.

Schmitz knocked the head off another.

"Dot one for me iss," he said.

Then the night began. The Dutchman drank and sang and danced, and a
hundred times assured the Missing Link of his undying friendship. True,
he had occasional spasms of reawakened amazement, when he would gaze at
the man-monkey in stupid wonder, saying: "I don't understand me,
Sharlie," but Nickie's extremely human manner of disposing of gin seemed
to reassure him, and he would burst into song again.

In due course Nickie grew jovial, and lost all sense of his make-up and
his professional reputation, and he sang, too, and caper exuberantly
about Schmitz's kitchen, while Schmitz, reclining in a corner on the
floor, shook his fat sides with gargantuan roars of laughter. The sight
of this gigantic ape dancing a Highland Fling stirred the drunken
Dutchman to wildest merriment; he howled with delight.

"Goot, goot! Some more Sharlie!" he yelled. "Dance, dan