Bluebeard's Goat and Other Stories

By H.L. Mencken and S. T. Joshi

H.L. Mencken, in his illustrious career as a journalist, made his reputation with satirical writing and controversial ideals. Although his is a name not customarily associated with short fiction, it was his first literary love. From 1900 to 1919, he published nearly 60 stories and short-shorts, sometimes pseudonymously. Here for the first time, 30 of Mencken's thoroughly entertaining stories are collected, showcasing Mencken's wit and skill in a medium for which he is not well known. Meet a bumbling anarchist newspaper editor; the `Charmed Circle' of Long Island in a story strikingly prescient of F. Scott Fitzgerald; a shop owner whose mannequins belie a horrific secret; and a pair of wily entrepreneurs working in the Caribbean, among plenty of other excellent, amusing, and memorable stories. "Superb, clever, or hilarious use of language... Read "Epithalamium," a sendup of the social rigmarole of marriage for its exquisite choice of words, or the Poe-esque "The Window of Horrors," about a clothier and his obsession with life-like mannequins, for its chills. For quintessential Mencken, read "The Man of God," whose lowly grocer becomes an evangelist."-Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dufour Editions
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780802360243

H.L. Mencken

H. L. MENCKEN (1880-1956) was a journalist, critic, and satirist whose writings have had an enormous influence on American literature and  public life.

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Introduction

One does not associate the great American journalist Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) with the writing of short stories, but during the first twenty years of his literary career (approximately 1900–1920) he devoted considerable time and effort to the composition of short fiction, as well as to other literary genres quite remote from the newspaper and magazine work that dominated his long life. His earliest signed publication was a poem (To Rudyard Kipling, Bookman, December 1899), and his first published book was a slim collection of poetry, Ventures into Verse (1903).¹ It is true that this volume was largely an experiment in fine typography and book design on the part of some of Mencken’s friends, but at the time he at least put some stock in his talents as a poet.

In 1904, Mencken began a stint with the Baltimore Herald (a paper he had joined as a cub reporter in 1899, directly after graduating from Baltimore Polytechnic) as a drama critic. This work led, a decade or so later, to the writing of plays—chiefly one-acters, but culminating in the full-length three-act farce Heliogabalus (1920), cowritten with George Jean Nathan. This play may not, perhaps, have been undertaken in the spirit of abstract aestheticism—Mencken and Nathan were convinced that the veriest idiot could write a successful play, and Heliogabalus was written in a matter of six weeks—but Mencken thought well enough of his plays to publish them in magazines and to allow one of them, The Artist (1909), to be published separately in 1912. Several of them also appeared in his collection of humorous sketches, A Book of Burlesques (1916).²

But it was the short story that constituted a longtime literary love for Mencken. He states that The first [story] I sold was ‘The Cook’s Victory,’ a tale of the Chesapeake Bay oyster fleet, born of my investigation as a reporter of the shanghaiing of men that went on along the Baltimore waterfront.³ This story was published in Short Stories for August 1900. Mencken may be in error here, as a story entitled A Matter of Ethnology appeared in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Press on June 3, 1900; or it is possible that The Cook’s Victory was sold prior to A Matter of Ethnology but appeared in print after the latter. In any event, over the next six years Mencken published a full twenty stories in leading periodicals of the day—Short Stories (published by Street & Smith), Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, the Criterion, Monthly Story Magazine, and Red Book Magazine. (Another story, The Defeat of Alfonso, had been accepted by Youth’s Companion in 1900 but, as Mencken later declared, languished in an office safe for 25 years⁴ and did not appear in the magazine until 1926.) This number does not include an array of thirty-three Untold Tales that appeared in the Baltimore Sunday Herald from May 1901 to February 1902. These comic narratives are, for the most part, satires on local politicians under the guise of ancient Roman political figures who systematically engage in preposterous acts of chicanery for political or financial gain. Even discounting the Untold Tales, this is an impressive achievement even for a full-time short story writer. Mencken himself writes with justifiable pride, A few other members of the Herald staff were also trying to write—mainly comic opera libretti, but also short stories—but I was the only one that could show anything even remotely describable as success.⁵

So successful was he that, as early as the fall of 1901—shortly after the story The Flight of the Victor appeared in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, edited by Ellery Sedgwick—Mencken received an offer from the Boston publisher Richard G. Badger for a collection of his stories. At that time Mencken was unaware that Badger was a subsidy publisher, requiring his authors to pay for the publication of their books. In later years Mencken would, in his review columns, cheerfully lampoon the poetasters who flooded the market with subsidized books from Badger. But in 1901 he did not have quite enough stories to fill a volume, although he thought he might have enough by the spring of 1902. Even after Badger explained his publishing procedures, Mencken remained tempted—as what twenty-one-year-old wouldn’t at the prospect of a published book, however it was engendered?—but he didn’t have the $300 that Badger required.

However, the experience fired Mencken to write enough stories so that a legitimate publisher would take them on their own merits. By the fall of 1902 he had such a volume assembled, and he sent it to Frederick A. Stokes & Co., a middle-grade New York publisher. Mencken tells the sad story: They were rejected so promptly that I was left crushed, and hence ready for another approach by the insidious Badger.⁶ Fortunately, by this time Mencken had heard unsavory things of Badger’s publishing enterprise, and he declined even the lower fee of $200 that Badger offered. Mencken goes on to say: It is possible that I approached other publishers during 1903 and 1904, but if so I have forgotten it, and I am inclined to believe that I didn’t, for by this time I was beginning to realize that fiction was hardly my trade.⁷

Despite these remarks, there is much to be said for Mencken’s early fiction writing. It is true that some of the stories of this period are unwontedly sentimental, coming as they do from a writer who later prided himself on hard-nosed if genial and even rollicking cynicism. Consider Hurra Lal, Peacemaker (Short Stories, May 1902), where a young Indian boy in Jamaica intervenes in a conflict between farmers and British soldiers by shouting God Save the Queen! The King and Tommy Crips (Red Book Magazine, July 1906) takes an affectionate look at a small American boy who, in a hotel room in Europe, lets off a firecracker on the Fourth of July and is arrested as an anarchist; he is freed from imprisonment by the king of the country, whose life was thought to be in jeopardy when the firecracker went off. Stories of this kind were highly popular in the magazines of the day, but somehow one expects Mencken to have raised his sights a little higher.

Given his lifelong penchant for humor and satire, it is no surprise that the great bulk of Mencken’s early stories are comic narratives; and several of them are amusing indeed. Perhaps the best of them is The Bend in the Tube (Red Book Magazine, February 1904), another tale of anarchists—who inspired in their day as much fear as terrorists do in our own—in which the would-be revolutionaries are hoist with their own petard. Several stories are set in Jamaica—Mencken had gone there in the summer of 1900, as a respite from overwork as a Herald reporter—and take a sympathetic attitude toward the plight of the natives of the island. Whether such stories—including The Cook’s Victory and A Double Rebellion (Short Stories, January 1902)—can deflect accusations of racism that have dogged Mencken since the 1989 publication of his diary is not entirely clear; these stories must be placed in conjunction with such tales as The Heathen Rage (Criterion, September 1904) and The Fear of the Savage (Criterion, November 1904), which pokes fun at the credulousness and superstitiousness of the Jamaican blacks.

Mencken’s greatest triumph in his early short story work may be The Last Cavalry Charge (Red Book Magazine, August 1906), a grim war story with a chilling conclusion. Not far behind is a similar tale, The Crime of McSwane (Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, July 1902), set in Nigeria. Both tales were very likely inspired by the work of Rudyard Kipling, whose poetry and prose appear to have served as models for Mencken’s own creative work during this period. Mencken was clearly attracted to the plain-spoken vigor of Kipling’s prose, his unsentimental depiction of the conflict of Anglo-Saxon and native in far-flung corners of the world, and the narrative drive that makes even the slightest of his tales an enthralling read.

A gap of nearly a decade separates The Last Cavalry Charge, Mencken’s last published story of 1906, with his later short story work beginning in the fall of 1914. During this juncture much had changed in Mencken’s life and career. The Baltimore Herald had folded in 1906, and later that year he joined the Baltimore Sun, initiating a lifelong relationship that ended only in late 1948, when a stroke abruptly silenced his pen after nearly five decades of tireless work. In 1910 Mencken helped to found the Baltimore Evening Sun, convinced that evening papers were the wave of the future. In the fall of 1908 he accepted an offer from the owner of the Smart Set, a highly regarded literary magazine published in New York, to be its regular book reviewer. (In spite of its title, the Smart Set was not a magazine of high society. If anything, it catered to the intellectual rather than the social elite.) Mencken’s first review column appeared in November 1908, and for the next fifteen years he wrote a 5000-word column without missing an issue.

Mencken’s life changed still further in the summer of 1914, when the Smart Set’s owner, John Adams Thayer, felt compelled to fire the editor, Willard Huntington Wright (later celebrated as the author of the Philo Vance detective stories, written under the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine), because Wright’s addiction to avant-garde writing was alienating the magazine’s readers. Mencken was offered the position, but accepted only on condition that his friend George Jean Nathan (who had become the magazine’s drama critic at about the time when Mencken had taken up the role of book reviewer) be named coeditor; Mencken also demanded that he work from his Baltimore home, since he was still intimately connected with the running of the Sun and Evening Sun. An arrangement was worked out whereby Mencken would take the train up to New York twice a month to confer with Nathan on editorial matters, then return to Baltimore after a night or two. The arrangement worked for more than nine years, but in late 1923 both editors resigned when a new owner declared himself inclined to make the Smart Set more geared toward popular fiction and coverage of celebrities.

At the time Mencken and Nathan took over the editorship of the Smart Set, they found themselves faced with a severe shortage of material. Mencken later wrote: "During our first few weeks, unhappily, very few likely manuscripts came into the office, for the flow of them is always low in summer; moreover, the news had got about that the Smart Set was in difficulties, and most writers of any experience had become wary of it."⁸ The only solution, in the editors’ view, was to fill the breach themselves. The first issue of the Mencken-Nathan Smart Set, November 1914, contained a grand total of twelve items by Mencken, all but two written under pseudonyms. The signed pieces were the 10,000-word story The Barbarous Bradley and his review column; the pseudonymous items were three poems, three humorous articles, and six sketches or vignettes that could classify as short-short stories. The December 1914 issue contained seven pieces by Mencken, after which the level of his contributions dropped off.

The period 1914–1919 saw the publication, all in the Smart Set, of twenty-one full-length short stories (of at least 2000 words) and fifteen sketches or vignettes. Nearly all of these are comic or satirical, and once again there are several that we would be much the poorer without. However low an estimate Mencken by this time placed on his work as a short story writer, the tales at least conformed to the kind of highbrow, sophisticated fiction the magazine’s readers had come to expect. A fair number of them exhibit that sardonic skepticism of the institution of marriage that Mencken, since his earliest days as an editorial writer on the Herald and later the Sun, had adopted as a part of his literary persona. Perhaps the most pungent is The Homeric Sex (September 1918), a searing display of a wife’s infidelity. More genuinely humorous is Wives (January 1919), a perhaps predictable but nonetheless amusing story about a man who excoriates the tiresome women his friends have married but can’t see that he has himself married just such a woman.

And yet, the most interesting of the tales during this period are those that eschew facile humor and probe deeper emotions. The Man of God (October 1918) is particularly unusual in Mencken’s corpus because of his frequently expressed ridicule of all things and persons relating to religion; but this story sensitively portrays a grocer who is fired with evangelical zeal. Equally anomalous is The Window of Horrors (September 1917), which would today be referred to as a tale of psychological horror. Mencken, although attracted to the fantasy of James Branch Cabell and the Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany, generally took a dim view of supernatural horror, as his scathing review of the work of Arthur Machen ( Smart Set, August 1923) demonstrates. But in The Window of Horrors he has fashioned a tale that does not require the supernatural to chill his readers.

Mencken’s two most impressive stories are his longest—The Barbarous Bradley and The Charmed Circle (August 1917). Both are intimately concerned with class distinctions and domestic conflict; the latter, at 16,500 words, is a veritable novella that strikingly anticipates, in its Long Island setting and high society atmosphere, the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early work Mencken himself would publish in the Smart Set. Mencken’s chief influence in these and other stories is probably Theodore Dreiser, whose work he had admired ever since he read Sister Carrie upon its publication in 1900; Mencken had sung Dreiser’s praises in the Smart Set when, after a decade-long hiatus, Dreiser had published Jennie Gerhardt (1911), the first in an array of novels in the 1910s that established its author as the leading novelist in the United States. Given Mencken’s penchant for social realism, it is no accident that his own fiction reflects the kind of literary work that he most admired in such writers of the 1920s as Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis.

Mencken reprinted only four of his brief comic vignettes in the early volume A Book of Burlesques (1916), and few of his longer tales, either early or late, have been reprinted in later compilations of his work. But Mencken’s decades-long devotion to the short story should not be ignored, even if in some ways it is of greatest interest from a biographical perspective, as reflecting the kind of literature he himself championed in his reviews and articles. His humorous tales are invariably witty, clever, and funny; his more serious tales can be surprisingly grim, brooding, and tragic. A selection of his short fiction, belatedly fulfilling one of his earliest literary dreams, has been long overdue; and in the end we may come to regret that he did not devote more attention to this literary mode in the midst of his immensely prolific work as journalist and cultural critic.

—S. T. JOSHI

A Note on This Edition

The texts of the stories in this edition are derived either from A Book of Burlesques or from the original magazine and newspaper appearances. The first edition of A Book of Burlesques (1916) included the stories The Visionary, From the Memoirs of the Devil, The Incomparable Physician, Epithalamium, and A Statesman; the second edition (1920) omitted some of these items but did not include any additional stories. Mencken made some minimal textual revisions when reprinting his stories in A Book of Burlesques, including some title changes. Aside from a few corrections of apparent typographical or textual errors, the texts are presented without alteration. Mencken’s idiosyncratic usages—in style, syntax, punctuation, and other features—have been scrupulously retained, including his erroneous French in such works as The Rescuers.

I am grateful to Dr. Vincent Fitzpatrick, Curator of the H. L. Mencken Collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, for assistance in the preparation of this volume.

Endnotes:

1 See my edition of Mencken’s Collected Poems (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2009).

2 I have assembled Mencken’s collected plays in the volume Heliogabalus and Other Plays (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012).

3 My Life as Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (New York: Knopf, 1993), 7.

4 Quoted in Betty Adler, H. L. M.: The Mencken Bibliography (Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library/Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 144.

5 My Life as Author and Editor, 7.

6 My Life as Author and Editor, 9.

7 My Life as Author and Editor, 9.

8 My Life as Author and Editor, 51-52

The Cook’s Victory

   "Forced into virtue, thus, by self-defence,

    E’en Kings learn justice and benevolence!"

                                        —An Essay on Man.

Captain Hiram Johnson, of the oyster pungy Sally Jones, thought that buckwheat cakes reached the maximum of deliciousness when they were a light, unbroken brown. Consequently, when Windmill, the colored cook of the Sally, placed before him a dozen which ranged in hue from a dirty, speckled russet to a charred and lustrous black, he was very angry indeed.

Pushing his chair back from the swinging table, he leaned against the solitary berth in the Sally’s cabin and swore earnestly and loudly.

What do you mean, you black rascal? he said. What do you mean, suh, by offerin’ me such garbage? Huh?

Deed it war’n’t my fault, cap’n, answered his dusky servitor, meekly. Dat dar la’d—

Don’t you go blamin’ it on that la’d! roared the captain. Don’t you dare do it!

I was on’y a-goin’ to say— began Windmill, but the captain refused to hear him.

I paid ten cents a pound fo’ that la’d in Balt’mo’, he shouted, and you can’t find no better nowhere! He arose and stamped with indignation. It ain’t the la’d; it’s you, you soot-faced, black-hearted, gin-soaked— but the captain’s anger paralyzed his tongue, and for a moment he could only splutter and fume. Windmill eyed him with alarm.

What did I hiah you fo’? demanded the captain, with increased vehemence. What do I pay you sixteen dolla’s a month fo’? To cook vittles or to burn them up?

As Windmill—who was thus named on account of the unusual prominence of his ears—made no reply to these questions, the captain proceeded to learn him, by precept and example, how to fry buckwheat cakes in the manner of the masters of the art. Stalking to the galley, he gave the feeble nut coal fire a few savage thrusts with the poker and began larding the pan. Windmill stood by in silence.

You take a hunk of la’d as big as a quarter, he said, suiting the action to the word, and spread it over the bottom of the pan. Then you h’ist a spoonful of battah and dump it onto the la’d—so. You see?

Windmill replied that he saw, and the captain proceeded to complete the operation. First, he gave the crackling cake a few jabs with the turner, to loosen it up, as he said, and then, when he thought the under side sufficiently browned, he attempted to turn it. But here he met with difficulties. The cake was fast attached to the pan. Finally, however, after the under side had become a rich black, he succeeded in detaching it, and then, with a deft movement, he slid the turner under it and gave it a graceful toss in the air. It rose as one cake and came down in seventeen pieces.

Thunderation! he shouted, turning to the trembling Windmill. What do you mean, suh, by that, suh? The cook quailed beneath the weight of profanity which followed.

You must ’a jogged it too much, he ventured, feebly. The captain’s face became a dark, luminous purple.

Do you mean to criticize me? you black villain! he asked in a voice which suggested the howl of a storm. Do you mean to blame it on me when your battah falls to bits? He shook the pan at the frightened darkey’s head. Overboard with it! he said, seizing the bowl. Overboard with it! And he hurled it bodily through the open skylight and spread its contents about the deck above.

The two dredgers who constituted the pungy’s crew dodged the flying batter as it came toward them, and jumped from the dredge which they had been operating in alarm. On peering down the hatch they received salutes which cut their investigations short.

The captain, having thus disposed of his breakfast, remembered that he was still hungry, and being in a desperate mood, resolved to cook his meal himself. Windmill he ordered to stand by for instruction. With infinite pains he mixed a new bowl of material, and with even greater care prepared the stove and the pan. As he proceeded step by step he kept up a running fire of sarcastic explanation. At last the first cake neared completion.

Carefully he shifted it to the turner and cautiously he braced himself to flip it. Then he tossed it in the air and it fell intact and right side up—on the stove lid beside the pan. Windmill jumped to the rescue, and was about to lift it from its resting place, when the broad part of the turner, propelled by the captain’s muscled arm, collided with the back of his kinky head, and the captain’s heavy shoe-tip came into sudden contact with his crazy bone. The face of the captain was again a deep, luminous purple.

Now you’ve settled your hash for good! he exclaimed, as the cook danced with the pain of the double blow. Now you can pack your traps and git ashore! Git! You son of unrighteousness! Git! Move! Jump!

But the cook didn’t git, and neither did he move or jump. Instead he backed toward the mast and assumed a defensive attitude.

The crew stopped their work and stared dumfounded. Being shanghaied men, who had been lured into a shipping office in Baltimore while too drunk to walk unassisted, and placed aboard the Sally while in a state of insensibility, they looked with delight upon the threatened war. It might end in their personal gain. But they knew that the captain carried a remarkably fierce-looking pistol in his hip pocket, and when he slowly drew it from its hiding place they stood at attention with very respectful expressions upon their unwashed faces.

Ah! said the captain, with long-drawn emphasis. Mutiny, is it? His bushy eyebrows seemed to meet and his beard to stand on end like the fur of a battling tom cat. As he cocked his revolver the cook grew limp, and slowly and fearfully started to wriggle ’round the mast.

Ease up! commanded the captain, and then to the crew: Bring up the irons. The cook halted, and as the captain replaced his revolver in his pocket, began to make a plea for mercy. But the captain was in no mood for compromise. Bringing forth the stump of a cigar from the depths of one of his vest pockets, he lighted it with care, and after blowing a huge cloud of suffocating smoke from his nostrils, said, with solemnity:

You’re a dead nigger. The cook shuddered, and the captain went on: Yes, you’re a goner. You’re a mutiner, by Jupiter, a rank, howlin’ mutiner. Article two twenty-one, chapter thirteen, verse seven, of the acts of the Legislature of Maryland in Congress assembled covers you all right. ‘And if any man shall commit mutiny aboard any vessel in the Ches’peake Bay or tributaries thereof, he shall be taken to the jail from whence he come, and be there hanged by the neck ’till he be dead. And may God have mercy on his soul.’ That’s the law—chapter and verse.

At this point the crew reappeared with a pair of ship’s irons that had been in the possession of the captain’s family since the days when his great grandfather, one Silas Noah Johnson, commanded a Baltimore clipper ship. They weighed little short of fifty pounds, and were covered with rust and dirt. Laboriously the crew pried open the jaws designed to encircle the legs of captives, and fitted them about the ankles of the quaking Windmill.

Lemme go, cap’n, wailed the latter woefully. I didn’t mean no hahm, cap’n. I wasn’t a-goin’ to hit you.

By Jupiter, I know you wasn’t, replied the captain with fine scorn. The idear! You hit me! Well, I guess not! But—oh, let it go at that. I think I’ll put in at Joneses Point and hang you myself. Hump yourselves, there—this to the crew, who were painfully trying to lock the irons. Ain’t you got no strength? Shove ’em together!

The crew, with much difficulty, fastened the irons on Windmill’s legs and made the chain fast to the mast. Then they stood by while the captain delivered an harangue on mutiny, hanging and other matters, which fairly bristled with blasphemous metaphors and profane similes.

Now you get back to work, he said, as he ended and went aft. The crew returned to the dredge windlass and soon had it creaking busily. At times the captain helped them cull the oysters which the dredge brought up, and at other times he labored at the wheel.

Windmill had sunk to the deck, and with the irons encircling his legs, sat disconsolate and silent. That he had done nothing to warrant his execution he was sure, but he also well knew that on Chesapeake Bay it is customary for each pungy captain to enact his own laws and execute his own sentences. A year before, one Captain Joshua Kellum, under whom he then served, had put him in irons and refused him all food for three days because he had incautiously displayed a revolver. A man whom he had met when last ashore had been locked up in the hold for forty-eight hours because he had questioned his captain’s veracity. Memories such as these made Windmill exceedingly downcast.

At intervals the captain came forward and inspected the irons which bound his prisoner. The latter, more than once, begged to be released. A strong northwest wind had sprung up, and he was becoming numbed by the cold and flying spray. But the captain was obdurate, and to the darkey’s plaints he made profane and positive answers.

Now it must not be supposed that he was by nature an unusually cruel or heartless man. As a matter of fact, when compared to the average pungy captain, he was considerate and kind in the extreme. But on this trip there had been much to vex him.

First, there was the persistent bad luck which had followed the Sally since her departure from Baltimore a week before. All the way down the Chesapeake a series of minor accidents had befallen her. While becalmed off Kent Island, the first night out, the boy whose duty it was to cull the oysters taken had escaped by swimming ashore. Then the water cask had sprung a leak and it had become necessary to secure another at Crisfield. Then one of the crew, by some unknown means, had obtained possession of the captain’s whiskey bottle, and by emptying it had become gloriously drunk. Then a sail had been torn and the bowsprit had cracked and a heavy dredge block had fallen on the captain’s foot.

Added to these misfortunes was a greater one: The Sally had searched in vain for good ground. On an oyster bed which the captain had discovered on a previous trip, and which he thought that he alone had located, he found a dozen busy tongers. On the Sells’ Point beds were scores of Crisfield boats. Everywhere the Sally went rivals were encountered. This had made the captain exceedingly pessimistic, and in all probability had caused him to recognize signs of mutiny in the cook’s inability to fry a perfect buckwheat cake.

At nightfall one of the crew, by order of the captain, brought Windmill a huge chunk of stale bread and a can of water. The darkey, chilled to the bone by the damp bay wind—for it had blown up cold during the day—begged for a release from his bonds, but to all entreaties the captain was deaf. When the latter came forward, before turning in, to light the mast lights, Windmill was in tears, and with much mournful eloquence pleaded for permission to carry his chains below for the night. But the captain still paid no heed to his lamenting.

Before midnight the thermometer began falling rapidly. Windmill, exposed to the blasts of the storm, shivered and quaked like a fever patient. By crouching in the lee of the water barrel he succeeded in escaping some of the gusts of cutting wind, but despite his efforts to protect himself he well-nigh froze. His ears, which many a facetious shipmate had referred to as studding sails, seemed to be dropping from his head, and his arms and legs grew numb. By the time the first faint pink of the dawn showed over the Wicomico shore he was half senseless.

The captain, in his berth in the study cabin, had rested but indifferently. So far not more than twenty-five bushels of oysters had been dumped into the Sally’s hold. The two men of the crew, who had been signed for ten hours’ work a day, had labored, on an average, about fourteen. The pungy had been four days on the beds, and she was now far down the bay, within less than fifteen miles of the Virginia line. Of these things the captain thought while he lay awake, and then he thought of the good beds beyond the border. It was true that dredging over there was forbidden to Maryland boats, but then did he not know that the sloops of the Virginia oyster navy were unable to be at more than one place at one time, and was it not worth the risk?

Twice before the captain had attempted poaching. Once he had been successful in eluding the guards, but once the Sally had got a shot through her cabin. He debated the matter in detail and at length, and finally decided to try his luck again.

Bright and early next morning the Sally began a slow movement toward the boundary. In the shoal water along the shore a pretence of dredging was kept up until dusk. While the crew strained and tugged at the windlass Windmill shivered at the mast. At breakfast time and again at noon a slab of bread and a can of water had been placed before him, and he had been commanded to eat and drink. After much begging he had been given a taurpaulin by the captain, and with this around him he felt fairly comfortable, though the cold steadily increased.

At sundown the captain approached him, and in silence unlocked his irons. Then he said:

You’ve been reprieved. Windmill stretched his limbs