e only
to look at Marny's sixty-inch waist-line to prove the truth of this
theory. Now look at me--I keep my figure, don't I? Not a bad one for a
light-weight, is it? I'm in perfect health, can run, jump, eat, sleep,
paint, and but for a slight organic weakness with my heart, which is
hereditary in my family and which kills most of us off at about seventy
years of age, I'm as sound as a nut. And all--all, let me tell you, due
to my observing a few scientific laws regarding hygiene which you men
never seem to have heard of."

Malone now rose to his feet, pewter mug in hand, and swept his eye
around the table.

"Bedad, you're right, Joppy," he said with a wink at Marny--"food's the
ruination of us all; drink is what we want. On yer feet,
gintlemen--every mother's son of ye! Here's to the learned, livin'
skeleton from Boston! Five per cint. man and ninety-five per cint.
crank!"

II

The next morning the group of painters--all except Joplin, who was
doing a head in "smears" behind the Groote Kerk a mile away--were at
work in the old shipyard across the Maas at Papendrecht. Marny was
painting a Dutch lugger with a brown-madder hull and an emerald-green
stern, up on the ways for repairs. Pudfut had the children of the
Captain posed against a broken windlass rotting in the tall grass near
the dock, and Malone and Schonholz, pipe in mouth, were on their backs
smoking. "It wasn't their kind of a mornin'," Malone had said.

Joplin's discourse the night before was evidently lingering in their
minds, for Pudfut broke out with: "Got to sit on Joppy some way or
we'll be talked to death," and he squeezed a tube of color on his
palette. "Getting to be a bloody nuisance."

"Only one way to fix him," remarked Stebbins, picking up his mahlstick
from the grass beside him.

"How?" came a chorus.

"Scare him to death."

The painters laid down their brushes. Stebbins rarely expressed an
opinion; any utterance from him, therefore, carried weight.

"Go for him about his health, I tell you," continued Stebbins, dragging
a brush from the sheaf in his hand.

"But there's nothing the matter with him," answered Marny. "He's as
skinny as a coal-mine mule, but he's got plenty of kick in him yet."

"You're dead right, Marny," answered Stebbins, "but he doesn't think
so. He's as big a fool over every little pain as he is over his
theories."

"Niver cracked his jaw to me about it," sputtered Malone from between
the puffs of his pip