After a little a sound of snickering behind him brought him to his feet, his face flaming. It was Baldy Minn, almost filling the doorway with her oceanic being, against which the bundle in her arms seemed incredibly tiny and helpless. She advanced, undulating and bubbling, to lay it across Va Di’s hastily crooked arms, laughing at his panic. He held his chin stiff and his eyes desperately horizontal. “Naw, naw!” he mumbled. “Somebody come.” He turned to Mamie, appealing, and Mamie, moved by that irresponsible humor which is deeper than solemnity, smiled. “Ton’,” she whispered, unsteadily. “It’s killin’, Ton’--how he favors you. It makes me laugh, Ton’--you without the mustache, _exactly_. I wish’d you’d look, Ton’.” His knees were no good; he sat down in a rocker and looked around the room for mental help. Rosie Courier, standing, a black, unimpeachable spire, beside the bureau, gave him none. Her lids were lowered and her thoughts had turned inward for refuge. By an irony, he had to come to Baldy Minn. Dirty, evil-fleshed, full of matter prurient, there still endured in her a flicker of that essential fire that lives, somehow, through all the changing winds of orthodoxies. She had to express it, of course, in her own way. “You old devil!” she bubbled, benevolently. “I might o’ knowed....” The bundle in Va Di’s arms became articulate, demanding its primal planetary food. The man’s muscles suffered a poignant sensation of combat, a gentle struggle with an infinitesimal kicking. His face became pink; his mouth muscles contracted in that species of self-conscious smirk so hard for others to bear; he opened and closed his lips tentatively, as though they were quite new and uncertain of their powers. “He’s--he’s--he’s a _s-s-stout_ little bastard,” he stammered, in all innocence. THE YELLOW CAT At least once in my life I have had the good fortune to board a deserted vessel at sea. I say “good fortune” because it has left me the memory of a singular impression. I have felt a ghost of the same thing two or three times since then, when peeping through the doorway of an abandoned house. Now that vessel was not dead. She was a good vessel, a sound vessel, even a handsome vessel, in her blunt-bowed, coastwise way. She sailed under four lowers across as blue and glittering a sea as I have ever known, and there was not a point in her sailing that one could lay a finger upon as wrong. And yet, passing that schooner at two miles, one knew, somehow, that no hand was on her wheel. Sometimes I can imagine a vessel, stricken like that, moving over the empty spaces of the sea, carrying it off quite well were it not for that indefinable suggestion of a stagger; and I can think of all those ocean gods, in whom no landsman will ever believe, looking at one another and tapping their foreheads with just the shadow of a smile.