self if I could live in such comfortable quarters.

Two hours passed in this way, though they had flown like five minutes,
when the cabin-boy came to say that tea was served in the saloon, and
then I skipped down to it as if the ship belonged to me. And no sooner
had I screwed myself into the commander's chair, which was fixed to the
floor at the head of the narrow table, and found the tea-tray almost on
my lap, than a wave of memory from our childhood came sweeping back on
me, and I could not help giving way to the coquetry which lies hidden in
every girl's heart so as to find out how much Martin had been thinking
of me.

"I'll bet you anything," I said, (I had caught Martin's style) "you
can't remember where you and I first saw each other."

He could--it was in the little dimity-white room in his mother's house
with its sweet-smelling "scraas" under the sloping thatch.

"Well, you don't remember what you were doing when we held our first
conversation?"

He did--he was standing on his hands with his feet against the wall and
his inverted head close to the carpet.

"But you've forgotten what happened next?"

He hadn't--I had invited William Rufus and himself into bed, and they
had sat up on either side of me.

Poor William Rufus! I heard at last what had become of him. He had died
of distemper soon after I was sent to school. His master had buried him
in the back-garden, and, thinking I should be as sorry as he was for the
loss of our comrade, he had set up a stone with an inscription in our
joint names--all of his own inditing. It ran--he spelled it out to me--

"HERE LICE WILYAM ROOFUS WRECKTED
BY IZ OLE FRENS MARTIN CONRAD
AND MARY O'NEILL."

Two big blinding beads came into my eyes at that story, but they were
soon dashed away by Martin who saw them coming and broke into the
vernacular. I broke into it, too, (hardly knowing that the well of my
native speech was still there until I began to tap it), and we talked of
Tommy the Mate and his "starboard eye," called each other "bogh mulish,"
said things were "middling," spoke of the "threes" (trees) and the
"tunder" (thunder), and remembered that "our Big Woman was a wicked
devil and we wouldn't trust but she'd burn in hell."

How we laughed! We laughed at everything; we laughed at nothing; we
laughed until we cried; but I have often thought since that this was
partly because we knew in our secret hearts that we were always hovering
on