“Shut the door, Harvey,” said the New Yorker.  “Shut the door and stay outside.  You’re not wanted here.”

“Who’ll stop me?” he answered, deliberately.  “Did you pay for my passage, Mister Martin?  ’Guess I’ve as good right here as the next man.”

He picked up some dice from a checkerboard and began throwing, right hand against left.

“Say, gen’elmen, this is deader’n mud.  Can’t we make a game of poker between us?”

There was no answer, and he puffed his cigarette, swung his legs, and drummed on the table with rather dirty fingers.  Then he pulled out a roll of bills as if to count them.

“How’s your mamma this afternoon?” a man said.  “I didn’t see her at lunch.”

“In her state-room, I guess.  She’s ’most always sick on the ocean.  I’m going to give the stewardess fifteen dollars for looking after her.  I don’t go down more ’n I can avoid.  It makes me feel mysterious to pass that butler’s-pantry place.  Say, this is the first time I’ve been on the ocean.”

“Oh, don’t apologize, Harvey.”

“Who’s apologizing?  This is the first time I’ve crossed the ocean, gen’elmen, and, except the first day, I haven’t been sick one little bit.  No, sir!” He brought down his fist with a triumphant bang, wetted his finger, and went on counting the bills.

“Oh, you’re a high-grade machine, with the writing in plain sight,” the Philadelphian yawned.  “You’ll blossom into a credit to your country if you don’t take care.”

“I know it.  I’m an American —­ first, last, and all the time.  I’ll show ’em that when I strike Europe.  Piff!  My cig’s out.  I can’t smoke the truck the steward sells.  Any gen’elman got a real Turkish cig on him?”

The chief engineer entered for a moment, red, smiling, and wet.  “Say, Mac,” cried Harvey cheerfully, “how are we hitting it?”

“Vara much in the ordinary way,” was the grave reply.  “The young are as polite as ever to their elders, an’ their elders are e’en tryin’ to appreciate it.”

A low chuckle came from a corner.  The German opened his cigar-case and handed a skinny black cigar to Harvey.

“Dot is der broper apparatus to smoke, my young friendt,” he said.  “You vill dry it?  Yes?  Den you vill be efer so happy.”

Harvey lit the unlovely thing with a flourish:  he felt that he was getting on in grownup society.

“It would take more ’n this to keel me over,” he said, ignorant that he was lighting that terrible article, a Wheeling ‘stogie’.

“Dot we shall bresently see,” said the German.  “Where are we now, Mr. Mactonal’?”

“Just there or thereabouts, Mr. Schaefer,” said the engineer.  “We’ll be on the Grand Bank to-night; but in a general way o’ speakin’, we’re all among the fishing-fleet now.  We’ve shaved three dories an’ near scalped the boom off a Frenchman since noon, an’ that’s close sailing’, ye may say.”

“You like my cigar, eh?” the German asked, for Harvey’s eyes were full of tears.