marked with very fine
needlework, were the initials T. C.

"What d'ye call him, Molly?" said Parson Jones. He was standing, as he
spoke, with his back to the fire, warming his palms before the blaze.
The pocket of the greatcoat he wore bulged out with a big case bottle of
spirits which he had gathered up out of the wreck that afternoon. "What
d'ye call him, Molly?"

"I'll call him Tom, after my own baby."

"That goes very well with the initial on the kerchief," said Parson
Jones. "But what other name d'ye give him? Let it be something to go
with the C."

"I don't know," said Molly.

"Why not call him 'Chist,' since he was born in a chist out of the sea?
'Tom Chist'--the name goes off like a flash in the pan." And so "Tom
Chist" he was called and "Tom Chist" he was christened.

So much for the beginning of the history of Tom Chist. The story of
Captain Kidd's treasure box does not begin until the late spring of
1699.

That was the year that the famous pirate captain, coming up from the
West Indies, sailed his sloop into the Delaware Bay, where he lay for
over a month waiting for news from his friends in New York.

For he had sent word to that town asking if the coast was clear for him
to return home with the rich prize he had brought from the Indian seas
and the coast of Africa, and meantime he lay there in the Delaware Bay
waiting for a reply. Before he left he turned the whole of Tom Chist's
life topsy-turvy with something that he brought ashore.

By that time Tom Chist had grown into a strong-limbed, thick-jointed boy
of fourteen or fifteen years of age. It was a miserable dog's life he
lived with old Matt Abrahamson, for the old fisherman was in his cups
more than half the time, and when he was so there was hardly a day
passed that he did not give Tom a curse or a buffet or, as like as not,
an actual beating. One would have thought that such treatment would
have broken the spirit of the poor little foundling, but it had just the
opposite effect upon Tom Chist, who was one of your stubborn, sturdy,
stiff-willed fellows who only grow harder and more tough the more they
are ill-treated. It had been a long time now since he had made any
outcry or complaint at the hard usage he suffered from old Matt. At
such times he would shut his teeth and bear whatever came to him, until
sometimes the half-drunken old man would be driven almost mad by his
stubborn silence. Maybe he would stop in the midst of the beating he