for squall;
But there isn't no fun in sailin'
When you haven't no boat at all.

For what is the use o' calkin'
A tub with a mustard pot--
And what is the use o' talkin'
Of a boat that you haven't got?

FOOTNOTES:

[4] From "Nautical Lays of a Landsman," by Wallace Irwin. Copyright,
1904, by Dodd, Mead & Co.

HOW JIMABOY FOUND HIMSELF

BY FRANCIS LYNDE

When Jimaboy began to live by his wits--otherwise, when he set up author
and proposed to write for bread and meat--it was a time when the public
appetite demanded names and _naivete_. And since Jimaboy was fresh
enough to satisfy both of these requirements, the editors looked with
favor upon him, and his income, for a little while, exceeded the modest
figure of the railroad clerkship upon which he had ventured to ask
Isobel to marry him.

But afterward there came a time of dearth; a period in which the new
name was no longer a thing to conjure with, and artlessness was a drug
on the market. Cleverness was the name of the new requirement, and
Jimaboy's gift was glaringly sentimental. When you open your magazine at
"The Contusions of Peggy, by James Augustus Jimaboy," you are justly
indignant when you find melodrama and predetermined pathos instead of
the clever clowneries which the sheer absurdity of the author's
signature predicts.

"Item," said Jimaboy, jotting it down in his notebook while Isobel hung
over the back of his chair: "It's a perilous thing to make people cry
when they are out for amusement. Did the postman remember us this
morning?"

Isobel nodded mournfully.

"And the crop?" said Jimaboy.

"Three manuscripts; two from New York and one from Boston."

"'So flee the works of men
Back to the earth again,'"

quoted the sentimentalist, smiling from the teeth outward. "Is that
all?"

"All you would care about. There were some fussy old bills."

"Whose, for instance?"

"Oh, the grocer's and the coal man's and the butcher's and the water
company's, and some other little ones."

"'Some other little ones'," mused Jimaboy. "There's pathos for you. If I
could ever get that into a story, with your intonation, it would be
cheap at fifteen cents the word. We're up against it, Bella, dear."

"Well?" she said, with an arm around his neck.

"It isn't well; it's confoundedly ill. It begins to look as if it were
'back to the farm' for us."

She came around to sit on the arm of the chair.

"To the railroad office? N