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Rh too, when the sailors trooped along the quay in the cool of the Sicilian evening, and bought fruit dirt-cheap, and for ten cents a long-necked bottle of Italian wine.

"Why don't ye git some to take aboard fer goin' back?" they would sometimes ask Harden. And when he answered that he had n't the money to spare, "You're too young to be so damn close," was their retort. For all that, it was a good-humored group of mariners that pushed along the streets, staring into the lighted windows, or at some pretty, dark Sicilian woman in a doorway. Yet always after a while the group mysteriously separated. The men disappeared, Marden noticed, alone or in pairs down some obscure side street, laughing loudly. Then Bunty Gildart, the second mate and a philosophical married man, took the boy carefully in tow, and they went back aboard ship together early.

"Ye see, boy," Bunty would say apologetically, as they two came along the quay together, "ye see, they has to be quiet ones in a crew, jest like everywheres else in the world, as a man might say." And he would wag his