ds one can exchange at the
kitchen door for grub.

After all, art is only consummate artfulness, and artfulness saves
many a "story." I remember lying in a police station at Winnipeg,
Manitoba. I was bound west over the Canadian Pacific. Of course, the
police wanted my story, and I gave it to them--on the spur of the
moment. They were landlubbers, in the heart of the continent, and what
better story for them than a sea story? They could never trip me up on
that. And so I told a tearful tale of my life on the hell-ship
_Glenmore_. (I had once seen the _Glenmore_ lying at anchor in San
Francisco Bay.)

I was an English apprentice, I said. And they said that I didn't talk
like an English boy. It was up to me to create on the instant. I had
been born and reared in the United States. On the death of my parents,
I had been sent to England to my grandparents. It was they who had
apprenticed me on the _Glenmore_. I hope the captain of the _Glenmore_
will forgive me, for I gave him a character that night in the Winnipeg
police station. Such cruelty! Such brutality! Such diabolical
ingenuity of torture! It explained why I had deserted the _Glenmore_
at Montreal.

But why was I in the middle of Canada going west, when my grandparents
lived in England? Promptly I created a married sister who lived in
California. She would take care of me. I developed at length her
loving nature. But they were not done with me, those hard-hearted
policemen. I had joined the _Glenmore_ in England; in the two years
that had elapsed before my desertion at Montreal, what had the
_Glenmore_ done and where had she been? And thereat I took those
landlubbers around the world with me. Buffeted by pounding seas and
stung with flying spray, they fought a typhoon with me off the coast
of Japan. They loaded and unloaded cargo with me in all the ports of
the Seven Seas. I took them to India, and Rangoon, and China, and had
them hammer ice with me around the Horn and at last come to moorings
at Montreal.

And then they said to wait a moment, and one policeman went forth into
the night while I warmed myself at the stove, all the while racking my
brains for the trap they were going to spring on me.

I groaned to myself when I saw him come in the door at the heels of
the policeman. No gypsy prank had thrust those tiny hoops of gold
through the ears; no prairie winds had beaten that skin into wrinkled
leather; nor had snow-drift and mountain-slope put in his wa