“I am going to do just nothing to him. The poor chap has had troubles of his own with her—enough to balance any ill will I might have had. Now, my wife was, or rather is, for she is not dead yet, the kind of woman that what she wants goes, whether you want it to go or not. I was captain on board my ship, but she was the captain at home, and I was crew and cabin boy combined. Maybe I was a bit breezy toward my men when I got to sea again after a month or so on shore. Well: my wife had a portrait of me, and about every half hour she used to hale my successor up before it and tell the poor devil to look at it and see a man and, what one looked like. She dinned my virtues into his ears so much that at last the poor wretch died in self-defense.” “And where is the lady now?” asked the young man with interest. “Somewhere in Boston, I believe. The last I heard of her she was giving my money away to the missionaries. I never had any use for missionaries, dead or alive. They come on board your ship, and the best you have is not too good for them, and they want to hold service every Sunday. I know a missionary as soon as I hear him speak. They always say Sabbath for Sunday, and babe for baby. There's lots of them down here.” For once the newspaper man forgot his tact, and said: “I should think that you would have been glad to have them hold service for the sailors. I have heard that they are mostly amenable to religious instruction and guidance.” “Yah! Just stow that. The sailors don't want any of their salvation any more than the Chinamen, and it don’t do any more good. You can't make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear, and sailors are nothing more than living machines when they are on board ship. They are all right aboard ship, but they are no good on land, and whoever wants to do a good turn to a sailor wants to see that he gets a ship as soon as the voyage is done. They need knocking down every day with a marlinspike, and to get a taste of the rope’s end every ten minutes, to give them a good appetite so they won't be forever grumbling about their grub.” The Captain might have continued indefinitely had not a polka struck up, and all the ghosts began to dance again. The dance of the marionettes came back to the young man’s mind with insistent force, but he tried to hide his amusement. To keep out of the way of the dancers the young man drew back and walked along close to the wall, and as he did so he was suddenly struck by the sight of a man stooping down so that he could eat out of a dish on the buffet without touching it with his hands. It was such a strange sight that he could not help making a mental note of it, and he really thought that he had not let the ghost see his curiosity. But it was not so, for the ghost turned and faced him and said sadly: