"I don't suppose I was worse off than hundreds of others, but it seems to me that she might have had the grace to let me down easily. She went and got married. I don't suppose she knew exactly what she was doing, because I got the letters just the same six weeks after she was married! It was an odd copy of an English paper that showed me what had happened. It came in on the same day as one of her letters, telling me she would be true to the gates of death. Sounds like a novel, doesn't it? But it did not amuse me in the least. I wasn't constructed to pitch the letters into the fire and pick up with a Yankee girl. I wrote her a letter; I rather wish I could remember what was in that letter. Then I went to a bar in Tacoma and had some whisky, about a gallon, I suppose. If I had anything approaching to a word of honour about me, I would give it you that I did not know what happened until I was told that my partnership with the firm had been dissolved, and that the house and lot did not belong to me any more. I would have left the firm and sold the house, anyhow, but the crash sobered me for about three days. Then I started another jamboree. I might have got back after the first one, and been a prominent citizen, but the second bust settled matters. Then I began to slide on the downgrade straight off, and here I am now. I could write you a book about what I have come through, if I could remember it. The worst of it is I can see that she wasn't worth losing anything in life for, but I've lost just everything, and I'm like the priest-chap in Cleopatra--I can't get over what I remember. If she had let me down easy, and given me warning, I should have been awfully cut up for a time, but I should have pulled through. She didn't do that, though. She lied to me all along, and married a curate, and I dare say she'll be a virtuous she-vicar later on; but the little affair broke me dead, and if I had more whisky in me I should be blubbering like a calf all round this Dive. That would have disgusted you, wouldn't it?" "Yes," said I. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 2: "Turnovers," Vol. VII.] A MENAGERIE ABOARD[3] It was pyjama time on the _Madura_ in the Bay of Bengal, and the incense of the very early morning cigar went up to the stainless skies. Every one knows pyjama time--the long hour that follows the removal of the beds from the saloon skylight and the consumption of _chota hazri_. Most men know, too, that the choicest stories of many seas may be picked up then--from the long-winded histories of the Colonial sheep-master to the crisp anecdotes of the Californian; from tales of battle, murder and sudden death told by the Burmah-returned subaltern, to the bland drivel of the globe-trotter. The Captain, tastefully attired in pale pink, sat up on the signal-gun and tossed the husk of a banana overboard.