ceeded, who had once told her a
ship was the "devil's hencoop." She would have liked also to explain to
him that she was not in the habit of wearing a purple bonnet. But her
thoughts were presently engrossed by an experience which interrupted
the even tenor of her young life.

She had been, as she afterwards remembered, impressed with a nervous
restlessness one afternoon, which made it impossible for her to perform
her ordinary household duties, or even to indulge her favorite
recreation of reading or castle-building. She wandered over the ship,
and, impelled by the same vague feeling of unrest, descended to the
lower deck and the forward bulkhead where she had discovered the open
hatch. It had not been again disturbed, nor was there any trace of
further exploration. A little ashamed, she knew not why, of revisiting
the scene of Mr. Renshaw's researches, she was turning back when she
noticed that the door which communicated with De Ferrieres' loft was
partly open. The circumstance was so unusual that she stopped before it
in surprise. There was no sound from within; it was the hour when its
queer occupant was always absent; he must have forgotten to lock the
door, or it had been unfastened by other hands. After a moment of
hesitation she pushed it further open and stepped into the room.

By the dim light of two port-holes she could see that the floor was
strewn and piled with the contents of a broken bale of curled
horse-hair, of which a few untouched bales still remained against the
wall. A heap of morocco skins, some already cut in the form of
chair-cushion covers, and a few cushions unfinished and unstuffed, lay
in the light of the ports, and gave the apartment the appearance of a
cheap workshop. A rude instrument for combining the horse-hair, awls,
buttons, and thread, heaped on a small bench, showed that active work
had been but recently interrupted. A cheap earthenware ewer and basin
on the floor, and a pallet made of an open bale of horse-hair, on which
a ragged quilt and blanket were flung, indicated that the solitary
worker dwelt and slept beside his work.

The truth flashed upon the young girl's active brain, quickened by
seclusion and fed by solitary books. She read with keen eyes the
miserable secret of her father's strange guest in the poverty-stricken
walls, in the mute evidences of menial handicraft performed in
loneliness and privation, in this piteous adaptation of an accident to
save the conscious s