“Friend of my seafarin' days. Now Captain Nelson, if ye please, in the coastwise trade, new back from the deep seas and the roaring trades with a tropical thirst. 'T is he sent me yon messenger,” and he indicated the bottle of rum. “Be easy. I'll not come back to Our Square till I'm sober.” “If you do, I'll swear you into Bellevue with my own right hand,” declared the Little Red Doctor disgustedly. He slammed the door as he went out. The next person to open that door was Captain John Nelson. There was a brief ceremonial in which the captain's messenger played an important rôle, the newcomer joined his voice, for old friendship's sake, in the refrain of MacLachan's favorite ballad, and shortly thereafter the twain were seen arm in arm making a straight course across the open for unknown lands. All that we of Our Square had to judge MacLachan's sea comrade by was a stumping gait, a plump figure, a brown and good-humored face, and a most appalling interpretation of the second part in simple harmony. We were to see him once again, briefly; to hear from his lips the events of that astonishing evening. Of the Odyssey of the sailor and the tailor there is little to be said. Crisscross and back, along Broadway, from Fourteenth Street upward, it ran, coming to a stop shortly before theater-closing time at a small restaurant which, I am told, has a free-and-easy rather than an unsavory repute. There they sat down to a bit of supper, having had, as the captain pathetically stated later, not a bite to eat since dinner at eight o'clock. I still possess the worthy mariner's “chart of the operations,” as he terms it, sketched in order that we landlubbers of Our Square might comprehend fully how it all developed. From this masterpiece of cartography I learn that the two friends occupied a side table some halfway down the room, Captain Nelson facing the rear. At the next table back, and therefore directly in his view, sat a couple, the lady spreading so much canvas that she covered all of ninety degrees, whereby the mariner means, I take it, that his neighbor's hat shut off his view of the prospect beyond. Food and drinks being ordered, MacLachan had just leaned back to a discussion of the relative merits of Burns and Garlyle when the orchestra struck into a tune not unlike “The Cork Leg.” To the scandal and distress of the captain, MacLachan straightway lifted up his voice:-- “A tinker in Rotterdam, 't would seem, Had made cork legs his study and theme, Each joint was as strong as an iron beam And the springs were a compound of clockwork and steam. Ri-tu----