By the way, on that Old Dominion steamer there was a newly-married couple--there always is. [Illustration] I soon discovered that the lady had been something of a yachtswoman, and seemed perfectly at home on the heaving ocean. Not so the newly-made Benedict. As soon as the swell off the capes set us to dancing he rushed to the side and started lightening the ship. This he repeated many times, but was too game to seek his berth. So, as night came on, they sat there, she chipper as a lark, and he about as dejected a bridegroom as could be found in seven counties. Perhaps she thought a touch of the romantic might get him out of his mood, so she tried this: [Illustration] "The moon is up, isn't it, darling?" "Yes," I heard him reply, languidly; "that is, if I swallowed it." It isn't often that a shrewd lawyer gets two set-backs on the same day. Yet I once witnessed such a thing. It was in a Western city--never mind the name. This lawyer was cross-examining a woman who it seemed was the spouse of a burglar of considerable notoriety. [Illustration] It was his intention to shatter her testimony, and he went about it in the usual browbeating way. "Madam, you are the wife of this man?" "Yes." "You knew he was a burglar when you married him?" "Yes." "How did you come to contract a matrimonial alliance with such a man?" "Well," the witness said, sarcastically, "I was getting old, and I had to choose between a lawyer and a burglar." The cross-examination ended there. In the other case, the gentleman of the green bag received even a worse dose, and he was such a bulldozing character that no one felt sorry. "Now, sir," began the attorney, knitting his brows and preparing to annihilate the witness whom he was about to cross-examine, "you say your name is Williams? Can you prove that to be your real name? Is there anybody in the courtroom who can swear that you haven't assumed it for purposes of fraud and deceit?" "I think you can identify me yourself," answered the witness, quietly. "I? Where did I ever see you before, sir?" demanded the astonished lawyer. [Illustration] "I put that scar over your right eye twenty-five years ago, when you were stealing peaches out of father's orchard. Yes, I'm the same Williams." Which must have shattered some of the nerve of that same legal gentleman. But that's nothing to the nerve of a Western landlord! One of them roped me in for fair. You see the blamed hotel burned down while I was there, and--would you believe it?--the next day I got a bill from the proprietor for a fire in my room. I've been abroad more than once during my checkered career, the last time with a company that played the "Children of the Ghetto." When it was staged in New York, in order to get the best effect of the mob scene the manager went into the New York Ghetto and engaged the real article, employing at the same time an interpreter to explain to them in Yiddish the stage directions. The plan was successful.