“I’m not taking any offence as long as you don’t interfere with what doesn’t concern you. If you want to know what the row was about, I’ll tell you----” “Not here,” I urged. “And why not here?” demanded the other, blazing up into sudden wrath. “D’ye suppose I’m afraid to speak before any putty-faced Dutchman that ever trod the rotten deck of a Baltic sea-knacker? I’ll speak where I please and say what I like; and what I mean to say is that these damned Scandinavians are the pest of the high seas. Why, devil take it! they navigate their ricketty derelicts as if they’d served their time in Noah’s Ark. Perhaps one of ’em did, too,” he added, with a sour grin all on one side of his face, “and then I’d lay anything that it was his watch on deck when she got ashore on Mount Ararat.” A chorus of guffaws greeted this sally and threatened to bring the quarrel to a crisis, for the Norwegian, who had reseated himself, now rose, crimson in the face and, thrusting his hand under the skirt of his coat, stepped forward, shouting hoarsely: “You are a dommed liar--a cursed, ugly-faced wrecker, and I am going to show you----” “Here, Oi say, none o’ that!” interposed the jolly smacksman at this juncture, for a broad-bladed “green-river” had made its appearance from under the foreign sailor’s coat. “Do what ye loike with yer fists, but no cold iron without you want to find yer head jammed in the bight of a rope.” “Let me go!” roared the Norwegian, struggling in the grasp of the smacksman and a couple of sturdy colliers, “let me get at him! I am going to show him something.” “Well, let’s see what he’s going to show me,” said the Englishman, pushing forward with a very ugly expression on his unsymmetrical face. “Don’t be a fool, mate,” said the smacksman interposing his massive person between the belligerents, adding in a lower tone, “They’ve sent for the police, I think.” Thinking this a favourable opportunity to intervene, I laid my hand on the Englishman’s arm. “Come,” I said coaxingly, “this won’t do, you know. For a man in your position--a stranger in the town, too--to be mixed up in a tavern brawl with people like this,” and I nodded vaguely at the company in general. I had no idea what the man’s position was, but it seemed a politic thing to say, and so it turned out, for he faced me with a mollified growl that encouraged me to proceed. “I’m sure it wouldn’t suit you to be involved in any scandal here. Why not come and have a drink with me somewhere else? Come along. I want to hear all about this.” “Perhaps you’re right,” he replied in a quieter tone, and was turning towards the door when it suddenly opened and a tall elderly man in a peaked cap and black uniform entered. “Here’s Muster Jenkins,” announced the smacksman as the newcomer, raising his hand, inquired in rounded oratorical tones: “What’s hall this disgraceful noise and riot about?”