aiter, and might have
accepted a tip. I could not recall having met him.

"You seem to have the advantage of me," I said. "I know the Welland
Canal, however, though I am trying to forget that ditch."

"You can't," he laughed. "No man can who ever went through it. That
trip with you in the old _Samana_ was my first and last. I struck
for salt water again when the old man paid me off at Port Colborne.
Don't you remember going to school with me?" He mentioned his name, and
with a little effort I recalled him--a schoolmate a little older than
myself, who had gone to sea early in life, and returned a full-fledged
salt-water navigator, to ship, on his record, as first mate in the
schooner that carried me before the mast, and to meet his Waterloo in
the Welland Canal, the navigation of which demands qualities never
taught nor acquired in the curriculum of sea-faring. After grounding
the schooner several times, parting every line on board, and driving us
to open revolt by the extra work coming of his mistakes, he was
discharged by the skipper. As I thought of all this the grumbling
sailor rose within me, and there at the table, he a waiter, I a writer,
we fought out a grudge of twenty years' standing. But it ended
amicably; I called him a farmer, he called me a soldier, and we shook
hands.

"I've learned," he said, as we settled back, "only in the last month or
so, that you're the fellow that writes these rotten sea stories. Why
don't you write real sea stories?"

"For the same reason that you don't serve a real Welsh rabbit," I
answered, tapping the now cold concoction he had served me. "I couldn't
sell a real story. Truth is too strange to pose as fiction."

"That's so," he answered, slowly. "Who'd think that you could have
become a writer, and I a hash slinger? Making lots of money, I
suppose."

"No, I'm not, or I wouldn't be in your society to-night."

"We're all bluffers, I guess. You are, here in this beanery with your
glad rags on. I am, too--no, not now. I'm slinging hash, and glad of
the chance. But I was a millionaire for a time. Not long. But while it
lasted I had dreams--big dreams."

I asked him about this, and there followed his story. It was
interrupted every few moments by calls for "ham and--," "corn beef
and--," "mystery and white wings," and it kept me at the table until
daylight. He preluded it by the advice to write it up as a real sea
story, but asked that I suppress his name until he had saved e