soon as she had hauled into the dock, and hurried up home.  The house was shut, and not a soul in it; and I didn’t know what to do, and I sat down on the doorstep to wait till the neighbors woke up, to ask them what had become of my family.  And the first one come out he told me my wife had been dead a year and a half, and the baby I’d never seen, with her; and one of my boys was dead; and he didn’t know where the rest of the children was, but he’d heard two of the little ones was with a family in the city.”

The man mentioned these things with the half-apologetical air observable in a certain kind of Americans when some accident obliges them to confess the infirmity of the natural feelings.  They do not ask your sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own risk, with a chance of having it thrown back upon your hands.  The contributor assumed the risk so far as to say, “Pretty rough!” when the stranger paused; and perhaps these homely words were best suited to reach the homely heart.  The man’s quivering lips closed hard again, a kind of spasm passed over his dark face, and then two very small drops of brine shone upon his weather-worn cheeks.  This demonstration, into which he had been surprised, seemed to stand for the passion of tears into which the emotional races fall at such times.  He opened his lips with a kind of dry click, and went on:—­

“I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city, and at last I found the children.  I’d been gone so long they didn’t know me, and somehow I thought the people they were with weren’t over-glad I’d turned up.  Finally the oldest child told me that Julia was living with a Mr. Hapford on this street, and I started out here to-night to look her up.  If I can find her, I’m all right.  I can get the family together, then, and start new.”

“It seems rather odd,” mused the listener aloud, “that the neighbors let them break up so, and that they should all scatter as they did.”

“Well, it ain’t so curious as it seems, Cap’n.  There was money for them at the owners’, all the time; I’d left part of my wages when I sailed; but they didn’t know how to get at it, and what could a parcel of children do?  Julia’s a good girl, and when I find her I’m all right.”

The writer could only repeat that there was no Mr. Hapford living on that street, and never had been, so far as he knew.  Yet there might be such a person in the neighborhood:  and they would go out together and ask at some of the houses about.  But the stranger must first take a glass of wine; for he looked used up.

The sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested that he did not want to give so much trouble, but took the glass, and, as he put it to his lips, said formally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, “I hope I may have the opportunity of returning the compliment.”  The contributor thanked him; though, as he thought of all the circumstances of the case, and considered the cost at which the