Mermaid, otherwise Mary Smiley, wore coiled upon her head such a magnificence of dark, red-gold hair as to make her the target of envious glances from cropped young women all about her. Of these looks she seemed completely unaware, but they excited the amusement of her companion. Dick Hand did not fit in with the general Bohemian scheme of the place. He was in Greenwich Village but not of it. His proper environment was a certain office much farther down town in New York, on Broadway a little above Bowling Green. There, in the region of tall buildings at once rigid and supple and perfectly self-possessed as only skyscrapers can be, Dick worked by day. By night he pleasured about town. He was by no means addicted to the Pirates’ Den, nor to the Purple Pup, nor Polly’s, but Mermaid, in her last year of special study at Columbia, had expressed a desire to visit--or, rather, revisit--the Village. So they had come down on a bus to Washington Square and then fared along afoot. Mermaid had been expressing her satisfaction with the evening. “How badly they do this sort of thing here,” she said, glancing again about her. “You and I, Dickie, wouldn’t be so unoriginal, I hope!” Dickie, who had no instinct in these matters, asked, “Are they unoriginal?” “Of course.” She smiled at him and two tiny shadows marked the dimples in her cheeks. “They have simply no ideas. Don’t you see how religiously they have copied all the traditional stuff and accepted all the traditional ideas of what a pirates’ den ought to be? A real pirates’ den was never like this. Pirates lived in a ship’s fo’c’s’le or, on occasion, in a cave; or they went glitteringly along a white beach such as we have at home across the bay from Blue Port. They did not live in a litter of empty casks; an empty bottle was only good to heave overboard unless you had occasion to break it over a comrade’s head. Pirates never had a skillfully executed chart. Usually they had no chart at all; only certain sailing directions and a cross bearing. Robert Louis Stevenson, writing ‘Treasure Island,’ burlesqued an ancient, if not very honourable, profession.” “Never thought about it,” responded Dick, carelessly. “You may be right. But what do _you_ know about pirates, anyway. Where do you get all this stuff?” “There are just as many pirates as ever there were,” asserted the young woman. “There’s Captain Vanton out home. He is a typical pirate. The pirates who visited the Great South Beach at one time or another are still there, off and on.” “Oh, say, Mermaid. You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?” “I don’t have to believe in them, Dickie, I have seen them.” “On the beach, home?” “On the beach, home, and here in New York, too.” “What were they?” “Just people, Dickie. I don’t pretend they were flesh and blood. I don’t pretend they ever spoke to me or looked at me. They looked through me, sometimes.” “But, Mermaid, you know it’s silly.” “But, Dickie, I know it’s not.”