Mary. If lost Margaret called me I mightn't hear
her there. I must be here when my time comes. It can't be very far off
now."

I wrote often to Uncle Jesse through the winter and sent him books and
magazines. He enjoyed them but he thought--and truly enough--that none
of them came up to his life-book for real interest.

"If my life-book could be took and writ by someone that knowed how, it
would beat them holler," he wrote in one of his few letters to me.

In the spring we returned joyfully to Golden Gate. It was as golden as
ever and the harbour as blue; the winds still rollicked as gaily and
sweetly and the breakers boomed outside the bar as of yore. All was
unchanged save Uncle Jesse. He had aged greatly and seemed frail and
bent. After he had gone home from his first call on us, Mother cried.

"Uncle Jesse will soon be going to seek lost Margaret," she said.

In June Robert came. I took him promptly over to see Uncle Jesse, who
was very much excited when he found that Robert was a "real writing
man."

"Robert wants to hear some of your stories, Uncle Jesse," I said.
"Tell him the one about the captain who went crazy and imagined he was
the Flying Dutchman."

This was Uncle Jesse's best story. It was a compound of humour and
horror, and though I had heard it several times, I laughed as heartily
and shivered as fearsomely over it as Robert did. Other tales
followed; Uncle Jesse told how his vessel had been run down by a
steamer, how he had been boarded by Malay pirates, how his ship had
caught fire, how he had helped a political prisoner escape from a
South American republic. He never said a boastful word, but it was
impossible to help seeing what a hero the man had been--brave, true,
resourceful, unselfish, skilful. He sat there in his poor little room
and made those things live again for us. By a lift of the eyebrow, a
twist of the lip, a gesture, a word, he painted some whole scene or
character so that we saw it as it was.

Finally, he lent Robert his life-book. Robert sat up all night reading
it and came to the breakfast table in great excitement.

"Mary, this is a wonderful book. If I could take it and garb it
properly--work it up into a systematic whole and string it on the
thread of Uncle Jesse's romance of lost Margaret, it would be the
novel of the year. Do you suppose he would let me do it?"

"Let you! I think he would be delighted," I answered.

And he was. He was as excited as a schoolboy ove