seating myself upon a stump prepared to listen to my companion. He was a chief of many cruises and for some unaccountable reason had fixed on me as being a suitable recipient for his discourse. One more hash mark on his arm would have made him look like a convict. I listened and in the meanwhile many mounds of sand urgently in need of shoveling remained undisturbed. Upon this sand I occasionally cast a reflective and apprehensive eye. The chief, noticing this, nudged me in the ribs with an angular elbow. "Don't mind that, sonny," he said, "I'll pump the fear-o'-God into the heart of any P.O. what endeavors to disturb you. Trust me." I did. "Now getting back to this mermaid," he began in a confidential voice, "what I say as I didn't claim to have saw. It happened this way and what I'm telling you, sonny, is the plain, unvarnished facts of the case, take 'em or leave 'em as you will. They happened and I'm here to tell the whole world so." "I have every confidence in you, chief," I replied mildly. "It is well you have," he growled, scanning my face suspiciously. "It's well you have, you louse." "Why, chief," I exclaimed in an aggrieved voice, "isn't that rather an unappetizing word to apply to a fellow creature?" "Mayhap, young feller," he replied, "mayhap. I ain't no deep sea dictionary diver, I ain't, but all this has got nothing to do with what I was about to tell you. It all happened after this manner, neither no more nor no less." He cleared his throat and gazed with undisguised hostility across the parade ground. Thus he began: "It was during the summer of 1888, some thirty odd years ago," quoth he. "I was a bit young then, but never such a whey face as you, certainly not." "Positively," said I, in hearty agreement. "At that time," he continued, not noticing my remark, "I was resting easy on a soft job between cruises as night watchman on one of them P.O. docks at Dover. The work warn't hard, but it was hard enough. I would never have taken it had it not been for the unpleasant fact that owing to some little trouble I had gotten into at one of the pubs my wife was in one of her nasty, brow-beating moods. At these times the solitude and the stars together with the grateful companionship of a couple of buckets of beer was greatly to be preferred to my little old home. So I took the job and accordingly spent my nights sitting with my back to a pile, my legs comfortably stretched out along the rim of the dock and a bucket of beer within easy reach." "Could anything be fairer than that?" said I. "Nothing," said he, and continued. "Well, one night as I was sitting there looking down in the water as a man does when his mind is empty and his body well disposed, I found myself gazing down into two glowing pools that weren't the reflections of stars. Above 

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