ing round and drinking; and a tall young
chap, with a velvet coat and long hair, was playing a piano and singing
songs. After every song he would come round with a tin saucer and
collect pennies from us. I remember thinking how strange he looked. He
had a noble face, I should call it; he looked like a gentleman and spoke
like one, and there he was, collecting pennies! I was watching him
coming round to our table when a girl came in, a tall, dark young girl,
with a tray of glasses. 'Hello!' says the Chief, 'that's not Rosa, is
it?' The old woman nods and says, 'That's Rosa all right, Chief.' And
he called out to the girl to come over to us.

"She came at once. 'Here's a friend o' yours, Rosa,' says the old woman,
and the girl looks at the Chief and smiles a little. 'Why, she was only
so high last time I was here,' says the Chief. 'She has shot up.' 'Yes,'
says the old woman, who was called Rebecca, 'she'll be a fine woman one
o' these days.'

"They told me about her as we went back to the ship. No one knew who her
parents were. She had always been at the 'Isle o' Man,' and sailormen
had petted her because she was a nice little thing and would rap out a
bit of slang without knowing in the least what it meant. But now, as the
Chief said, it was a different matter. She was 'too big to kiss now.'
One point in her history I was very interested in, and that was the fact
that neither the Chief nor anyone else I ever heard speak of her ever
suggested that she wasn't straight. I liked that. There she was, living
among all the draggled, dirty seaport crowd, and yet the seafaring men
that took their drinks from her believed she was straight.

"I was coming down from the theatre one night about a week later, and I
thought I'd look in at the 'Isle o' Man' for a drink before going
aboard. There was a good few in there, Greek and Norwegian skippers; and
a Belgian engineer was sitting across from me with old Croasan. The
piano was going with _Little Dolly Daydream_, _Pride of Idaho_, when in
comes Rosa with her tray. To get past she had to squeeze between old
Croasan's table and the piano, and I saw him take hold of her waist. She
was hampered by the tray, and he was pulling her down on his knee.

"I don't think it was all gallantry that made me do what I did. I'd
never been a whale on that sort of thing. I'm not built on those lines.
I think it was a feeling that has always possessed me very strongly when
I see an old man with a you