When dinner was over the guest of the evening was tried by court-martial. He was accommodated with a chair in the centre of the room and given a cigar and a drink; a wide circle of candles in bottles was put about him to give light to the proceedings, and all the pirates sat in groups in the sawdust, the master-at-arms, with drawn cutlass, behind the prisoner, the accuser, a picturesque ruffian, and the prisoner's friend, an equally forbidding scoundrel, and the pirate Captain being the only individuals standing up. This grouping formed a really striking picture, and I have no doubt that many artistic eyes took in its possibilities. The accusation brought against the prisoner was that he had paid income tax (groans from the pirates), that he was even suspected of paying super-tax (yells of fury from the pirates), that he kept tame animals, notably Welsh rarebits, and that he fed them. The pirate Captain had already warned the prisoner that his sentence had been determined upon, and therefore that it was no use for him, or anybody else on his behalf, to plead his cause; but the prisoner's friend had a speech ready, and loosed it off, making the case very much blacker against his client than it had been before. Sentence was then duly pronounced, but as the pirate Captain had mislaid the plank on which the victim was to walk, and as the goldfish which were to represent sharks had been left downstairs, the doom of the victim resolved itself into the presentation to him of a pair of silver hand-cuffs with a tiny watch at the end of one of them. After the court-martial, the pirates gave themselves and their guest an entertainment. One pirate sang admirably; another pirate, whose name, I think, before he went to sea, was Walter Churcher, told excellent stories, and a third pirate went through the whole performance that the flashlight photographer inflicts on good-natured diners, his apparatus being a whisky bottle and a tin mug, and then handed round photographs he pretended to have taken of our guest. There was more fun to come, but as midnight was drawing near, and as I belong now to the early-to-bed sect of sea-wolves, I departed quietly. The lift boy at my flat, when he saw the brick-dust of my marine complexion, said to me, as he took me up: "Good gracious, sir, whatever has happened to your face?" It was a great night altogether! XXVI APPENRODT'S I had been, like every other Londoner, aware of the coming of Appenrodt's shops into the panorama of the London streets; but I had never gone into one of the Appenrodt establishments until a year ago, and it was the dread of the armour-plate sandwich of the buffets that sent me there.