ent Mariner who looked every inch the
part. Him a facetious, vacationing architect's clerk dubbed Noah, and so
greeted him.

"I say, Noah," he called. "Some flood, eh? Located Ararat yet?"

"Catch any fish?" bawled another youngster down over the rail.

"Gracious! Look at the beer! Good English beer! Put me down for a
case!"

Never was a more popular wrecked crew more merrily rescued at sea. The
young blades would have it that none other than old Noah himself had come
on board with the remnants of the Lost Tribes, and to elderly female
passengers spun hair-raising accounts of the sinking of an entire tropic
island by volcanic and earthquake action.

"I'm a steward," Dag Daughtry told the _Mariposa's_ captain, "and I'll be
glad and grateful to berth along with your stewards in the glory-hole.
Big John there's a sailorman, an' the fo'c's'le 'll do him. The Chink is
a ship's cook, and the nigger belongs to me. But Mr. Greenleaf, sir, is
a gentleman, and the best of cabin fare and staterooms'll be none too
good for him, sir."

And when the news went around that these were part of the survivors of
the three-masted schooner, _Mary Turner_, smashed into kindling wood and
sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more believed than had they the
yarn of the sunken island.

"Captain Hayward," one of them demanded of the steamer's skipper, "could
a whale sink the _Mariposa_?"

"She has never been so sunk," was his reply.

"I knew it!" she declared emphatically. "It's not the way of ships to go
around being sunk by whales, is it, captain?"

"No, madam, I assure you it is not," was his response. "Nevertheless,
all the five men insist upon it."

"Sailors are notorious for their unveracity, are they not?" the lady
voiced her flat conclusion in the form of a tentative query.

"Worst liars I ever saw, madam. Do you know, after forty years at sea, I
couldn't believe myself under oath."

* * * * *

Nine days later the _Mariposa_ threaded the Golden Gate and docked at San
Francisco. Humorous half-columns in the local papers, written in the
customary silly way by unlicked cub reporters just out of grammar school,
tickled the fancy of San Francisco for a fleeting moment in that the
steamship _Mariposa_ had rescued some sea-waifs possessed of a cock-and-
bull story that not even the reporters believed. Thus, silly reportorial
unveracity usually proves extraordinary truth a liar. It is the way of
cub reporters, c