At Hildegarde’s end of the table sat a group of three who seemed to have interests in common. “Mining men,” the giant said. They talked of the difficulty in getting all their machinery on board. They and the giant had stayed up till the _Los Angeles_ left the port of Seattle, mounting guard over their “stuff.” They aired their views about the ship. Plenty of white paint on her (or had been before so much of it came off on the passengers)—but the _Los Angeles_ was a whited sepulchre. “Hasn’t she just been an army transport?” ventured Hildegarde, with the average American’s unquestioning respect for anything indorsed by the Government. “Oh, yes, pressed into the service during the Spanish-American war. But the _Los Angeles_ is nothing more nor less than an antiquated Cunarder from ‘way back,’ known to our grandfathers in the sixties as the rolling _Roumelia_. She got such a bad name even in those days of primitive ocean travel, that she had to clear out of the Atlantic. They rechristened her, brought her round the Horn and turned her on to the Japan trade. Except for taking those Johnnies to Manila, she hadn’t carried passengers for thirty years until this company got hold of her, crowded in ten berths where there’d been two before, or none at all, and lied about the number of people they’d sold tickets to.” In the act of shoveling in Boston beans with his knife, the lean individual next Hildegarde paused to remark: “If a man had committed the worst crime in the calendar, it’d be a brutal punishment to make him sleep in the suffocatin’ black hole they’ve put me in.” “Exactly—” began one of the three financiers, assuming the lean one to be agreeing with him. “But,” interrupted the bean-feaster, “when they says t’ me they wusn’t no more room, I says, ‘Lookee here, it’s worth anywheres from fifty to sixty thousand dollars to me to be among the first to git there. You can put me in _any_wheres,’ I says. ‘Y’ can do anything in hell,’ I says, ‘except leave me behind.’ An’ b’ gosh they done it.” He champed his beans with a look that betokened renewed relish at having given the conversation an unexpected turn. Accomplished as this person was, he, with a plate full of Boston beans and a knife, could do nothing as original with his food as the passenger on the other side of the table next to the pretty girl. After one fascinated stare in his direction, Hildegarde felt it wiser to look away. It was not, however, that moment’s astonishing vision that prevented her from eating her own breakfast. The giant was charitably concerned. Try this, and that. But Hildegarde disposed of a little of the sticky gray porridge and condensed milk, a sip of the muddy coffee, and then she played with the sour bread while she listened to the conversation. Suddenly, whirling round her pivoted chair, she returned with ardor to the sunshine-flooded upper regions.