Royal Yachter

Manager S. J. Ballinger of Dunhill's Manhattan store reluctantly nodded to a clerk. The clerk hopped out to the teeming corner of 5th Avenue & 43rd Street to summon the busy traffic officer. The officer set off smartly down West 43rd Street.

"Hey, Romanoff!" the policeman cried to a rapidly vanishing little man in skiing corduroys and horn-rimmed glasses. "Hey, Romanoff, come back here!"

The little man stopped, faced the officer. "My name is not Romanoff," he said in lofty Oxonian. "It's Gerguson."

"We've got to go to the station, Romanoff," the policeman insisted.

"What's the use of taking me to the station," said the little man, swiftly changing tactics. "They'll only send me back to jail. I've got $60 here. Why not take that and forget it?"

But the officer did his duty. Thus last week, for the fourth time in ten years, Manager Ballinger, who first met Harry F. ("Mike") Gerguson (alias Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff) in Dunhill's London shop, had set the Law on his slick little customer. As of yore, Mike's craving for Royal Yacht pipe tobacco, at $10 per lb., had gotten him in trouble. He simply cannot keep a.way from Dunhill's and its fragrant mixture, which was first recommended to him, he claims, by his royal friend "David" (Prince of Wales).

Immigration authorities at Ellis Island, where Mike was to be found next day wearing a tiger orchid pinned to his sweater, were not quite sure what they could do with their prisoner. When he arrived in Manhattan three weeks ago after a year spent chiefly in French jails for stowing away on the He de France and later lifting other people's travelers' checks, Mike told his many barroom friends that he had arrived on the Euro pa, stowage (TIME, Jan. 2). But the Government's case against him for illegal entry on the Europa began to fade when the North German Lloyd line maintained that Mike cauld not have come into the country on their boat. Mike soon agreed, said he had entered via Canada. Secondary plan of the Government was to deport Mike as an alien, born in Vilna, Russia. But earliest available records of his genesis place him in a Manhattan orphanage. A film company has bought The New Yorker's recent Gerguson serial by Newshawk Alva Johnston.

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