he ground is
thawed out in the spring, we bury him just where he died. It may,
however, interest you to know that the letters 'O.H.M.S.' are cut on
his tombstone."

"'O.H.M.S.'" I repeated. "Don't you mean 'I.H.S.,' _Iesous Hominum
Salvator_, the same as we write over our altars and on our baptismal
fonts?"

"No!" he replied, "I mean 'O.H.M.S.'; the same as they stamp on
government letters which are franked '_On His Majesty's Service_.' You
see the work of delivering the mails down this way, while extremely
arduous, must never for a moment be considered as menial. The carrier
is a servant to none save His Imperial Majesty, George the Fifth, of
England."

They are all gamblers, these Northmen: they play for love, for money or
for the mere pleasure of the play, and Boys of our Heart, like the
mail-couriers and the striplings of the Mounted Police, gamble with the
elements for life itself.

"Ah, well!" remarked my host, as he put away his pipe for the night,
"these fellows know the rules and dangers of the game when they 'sit
in,' and while twenty-six of the cards are black, it is just as well to
bear in mind that there are an equal number of reds."

On my return to the ship at midnight, I found that some one had seized
and was occupying my state-room on the nine-tenths of the law idea.
She seemed to be a woman turbulent in spirit, and, accordingly I left
her in possession: also, I left her door open to the mosquitoes, who
are evil whelps and more tutored in crime than you could believe.

The purser, a very agreeable and well-behaved man, gave up his office
to me, but I did not rest well, in that a whirligig of jubilant
mosquitoes was occupying it conjunctively. Being full-blooded and
sometimes inclined to be rather mean, I endeavoured to accept this
retributory plague as a chastening which might prove beneficial to both
body and soul.

In the morning all the reckonings of the trip were settled at a desk
beside my bunk, the men moving around with the prehensile tread of the
villain who goes round a corner in the moving-picture films. I
pretended they had not awakened me, and breathed with much regularity,
but all the while I was stealthily peeping. They would not have
understood if I had made objections to their entering, for here, at the
edge of things, all men are gentlemen, or are supposed to be.
Conventionality would be actual boorishness, and a woman must try and
earn for herself the title of a good s