"—return?" finishes our stevedore. "Sure you returned each time? 'N' in what sortivver craft'd you sail to them places—and return—in?"
"Why, steamers," answers the lecturer.
"Passinjer?"
"Passenger? Certainly."
"Excuse me!" says our stevedore. "I oughter known better. O' course, you know all about sailors," and sits down.
The lecturer was all right. He was doing the best he knew, with the finest and fattest of words he could pick out, to make things clearer to his audience; and his audience, appreciating that, let him run on, until he said that there was not one mysterious thing which had ever happened that could fail to be proved very ordinary by mathematical, or historical, or logical, or physical, or some other "cal" deduction; which bounced our watch-dog out of his seat again.
"How d'you 'count," he growls, "for th' Orion 'n' Sirius?"
Well-l, he could not account for it, for the simple and overwhelmingly conclusive reason that, previous to that very moment, he had never heard of the ships named.
"Then s'pose you hear 'f 'em now," says our stevedore, and starts in and delivers the lecturer a lecture on the Orion and Sirius, and it wound up the show; for when the lecturer started to butt in, all the old barnacles, who before this had been clinging warily to the edge of their seats, now rose up and rallied around our stevedore to finish his story, which he did; and the old fellows, on leaving the hall, said that the credit of the proceeds for the Sailor's Haven fund, for that night, anyway, ought to go as much to their old college chum from the coal wharf as to any imported lecturer with his deckload of lantern slides.
But our stevedore didn't tell all there was of the Orion and the Sirius. The lecturer went home thinking he had been told all about it, but he hadn't. Here it is as it was.