after that, greatly enjoyed[14] their life at Elmwood Hall, and matters were more to their liking, but Tom was not at an end of having adventures.

[14]

As I have said, Mr. and Mrs. Fairfield had gone to Australia to look after some property. When Spring came they started for home, coming in a sailing vessel for the sake of the long sea voyage.

Unexpectedly, one night, one of Tom’s chums saw a note in a paper telling of a vessel picking up wreckage from the Kangaroo, the ship on which Tom’s parents had sailed. This at once plunged Tom into the depths of despair, but he did not give up hope. He at once decided to go to Australia himself, and if necessary charter a small steamer and cruise about in the location where the wreckage was picked up, hoping his parents might still be afloat on some sort of life raft, or in an open boat.

In the second volume of this series, entitled “Tom Fairfield at Sea,” I related the details of his most exciting trip. For Tom’s vessel, the Silver Star, on which he was proceeding to Sydney, was wrecked in a storm, and Tom was tossed overboard. He managed to grab a life belt, and floated until, in the early dawn, he saw two sailors from the ship clinging to a derelict which the Silver Star had hit, and which had wrecked her.

Tom got aboard, and a little later a partly[15] smashed lifeboat was sighted. It was brought to the derelict by one of the sailors, and found to contain Professor Skeel, who, it seems, had, by accident, taken passage for Honolulu on the same ship as that on which our hero started out. Naturally there was a mutual surprise.

[15]

Tom, the two sailors and Mr. Skeel were on the derelict for some time, and then having patched up the lifeboat they set out in that. But it was some time before they were picked up, and they had nearly starved. There was also a little boy saved from the wreck—Jackie Case—and Tom took charge of him.

Eventually Tom got to Australia, and then set out in a small steamer he hired to search for his parents. It was a long trip, but he heard that some survivors of a wreck were on an island in the Friendly group, though which island it was could not be learned. Tom searched on several and at last, and just in time, he discovered his father and mother, and some others who had gotten away in a small boat from the sinking Kangaroo.

That Tom was overjoyed need not be 

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