logs in our soaking bunks; but that wasn’t often. With each shift or fall of wind we crawled out on the yards, wet and frozen to the bone, to shake the hard canvas loose, and, as it generally happened, were sent aloft in an hour to furl it tight again. Each time it was a short-handed fight for life to master the thrashing sail. Our hands cracked open, and the cuts would not heal; stores were spoiled by the water that washed over everything, and some days we starved on a wet biscuit or two; but the demand for brutal effort never slackened. We were worn very thin when we squared away for the north with the first fair wind.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Ruth. “It must have been a grim experience. Didn’t it daunt you, and make you hate the sea?”

“I hated the ship, her skipper, and her owners, and most of all the smart managing clerk who had worked out to the last penny how cheaply she could be run; but that was a different thing. The sea has a spell that grips you, and never lets go again.”

“Yes,” said Ruth; “I have felt that, though I have seen it only in fine weather and from a liner’s saloon deck.” She mused for a few moments before she went on. “It will be a long time before I forget this voyage, steaming home over the sunlit water, with the wind behind us and the smoke going straight up, the decks warm, everything bright and glittering, and the glimmer of the moon and the sea-fire about the hull at night.”

There was an opening here for an assurance that the voyage would live even longer in his memory; but Jimmy let it pass. He feared that he might say too much if he gave the rein to sentiment.

“Were you not charmed with Japan?” he asked.

Ruth acquiesced in the change of topic, and her eyes sparkled enthusiastically.

“Oh, yes! It was the time of the cherry-blossom, and the country seemed a fairyland, quainter, stranger, and prettier than anything I had ever dreamed of!”

“Still, you must have seen many interesting places.”

“No,” she said with a trace of graveness. “I don’t even know very much about my own country.”

“All the Americans I have met seemed fond of traveling.”

“The richer ones are,” she answered frankly. “But until quite lately I think we were poor. It was during the Klondyke rush that my father first became prosperous, and for a 

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