The best men don't always come back from sea. Four good men stayed aboard the _Henriette_, and two of them--the skipper and John--were certainly quicker and braver than any of the others of us. The skipper could have come away first, but he didn't. Nor John. Six years I was shipmates with John and he was one good shipmate. Good shipmates--they make a long cruise short, a rough sea smooth. Good shipmates! You don't mind going with good shipmates alongside. And the _Antoinette_, she's a sister ship to the _Henriette_--thirteen tons net and thirty tons of ice in the hold. And that same dock lumper who never left a vessel leave Duncan's without he sees her off--he says she's down by the head, too. A fine joy-killer, that lad. We're putting out in an hour. So fair wind, boy--I'm off. The Medicine Ship Old Bill Green was comin' out of Spiegel's Caffy, meanin' a place where a man can have somethin' to eat while he's havin' a drink, an' he had folded over his arm what looked like a pretty swell coat for old Bill to be wearin'. Noticin' me, "Hulloh, Hiker!" says Bill, an' we stroll along till we come opposite to Wallie Whelan's father's store on South Street, where Bill stops. "I do like that little Whelan kid," says Bill. "I wonder is he in?" Wallie was in, an' "Hulloh, Hiker!" an' "How do you do, Mr. Green!" he says, an' comes runnin' out when he sees us. An' old Bill says, "Oh-h, driftin' by--driftin' by," an' spreads out to the air the coat he's carryin' on his arm. All wrinkled up it was, like somebody's slept in it, but a pretty swell coat just the same, like the kind hackmen wear to a funeral or a weddin' with a stovepipe hat. There's a pocket in one o' the coat-tails, an' old Bill slides his hand into it and out comes a case, an' when he springs open the case there's a shiny black pipe. "Well, well," says Bill, lookin' at the pipe like he was wonderin' how it come there. "Where did y' ever get that fine pipe, Mr. Green?" asks Wallie. "Oh, a souveneer, a little souveneer of other days--of days I'd 'most forgot," says Bill. "A handsome pipe!" says Wallie. "Yes," says Bill, "if on'y I had the fillin' of it once in a while!" "Wait!" says Wallie, an' rushes inside the store. "Comanche Chief, if you have any in stock!" calls out Bill after him. Mr. Whelan, who's sittin' by the open winder in his office, looks out to Bill an' then to the clerk an' smiles that it's all right to Wallie over the top of his mornin' paper, an' Wallie comes out with a plug o' Comanche Chief smokin' for Bill an' a plug o' the same of chewin' for me. I bites into mine right away, but old Bill looks at his pipe, an' then, sayin' he didn't know's he'd baptize it yet awhile, he reaches over an' gnaws a corner off my plug o' chewin'.