bruising his flesh, tying him helpless while
we sat and panted on him that he might not do harm to us, himself, or the
ship. And he, who still lived, died to us. Don't you understand? He
was no longer of us, like us. He was something other. That is
it--_other_. And so, in the poor-farm, we, who are yet unburied, are
_other_. You have heard me chatter about the hell of the longboat. That
is a pleasant diversion in life compared with the poor-farm. The food,
the filth, the abuse, the bullying, the--the sheer animalness of it!

"For two years I worked for a dollar and a half a week in the laundry.
And imagine me, who had melted a silver spoon in my mouth--a sizable
silver spoon steward--imagine me, my old sore bones, my old belly
reminiscent of youth's delights, my old palate ticklish yet and not all
withered of the deviltries of taste learned in younger days--as I say,
steward, imagine me, who had ever been free-handed, lavish, saving that
dollar and a half intact like a miser, never spending a penny of it on
tobacco, never mitigating by purchase of any little delicacy the sad
condition of my stomach that protested against the harshness and
indigestibility of our poor fare. I cadged tobacco, poor cheap tobacco,
from poor doddering old chaps trembling on the edge of dissolution. Ay,
and when Samuel Merrivale I found dead in the morning, next cot to mine,
I first rummaged his poor old trousers' pocket for the half-plug of
tobacco I knew was the total estate he left, then announced the news.

"Oh, steward, I was careful of that dollar and a half. Don't you see?--I
was a prisoner sawing my way out with a tiny steel saw. And I sawed
out!" His voice rose in a shrill cackle of triumph. "Steward, I sawed
out!"

Dag Daughtry held forth and up his beer-bottle as he said gravely and
sincerely:

"Sir, I salute you."

"And I thank you, sir--you understand," the Ancient Mariner replied with
simple dignity to the toast, touching his glass to the bottle and
drinking with the steward eyes to eyes.

"I should have had one hundred and fifty-six dollars when I left the poor-
farm," the ancient one continued. "But there were the two weeks I lost,
with influenza, and the one week from a confounded pleurisy, so that I
emerged from that place of the living dead with but one hundred and fifty-
one dollars and fifty cents."

"I see, sir," Daughtry interrupted with honest admiration. "The tiny saw
had become a crowbar, and