arted for the place he called home. It was in a poor
tenement, in one of the most congested districts of Chicago.

But if there were dirt and squalor all about, Mrs. Miller did her
best to keep her apartment clean. So though the way up to it was by
rather dirty stairs, the rooms were neat and comfortable.

"Well, Nat, you're home early, aren't you?" asked the woman, who, with
her husband, had befriended the orphan lad.

"Yes, Mrs. Miller."

"I suppose you couldn't get any work?"

"Oh, yes, I got some."

"What's the matter, then? Don't you feel well?"

She could not understand any one coming away so early from a place
where there was work, for work, to the poor, means life itself.

"Oh, I did so well I thought I'd take a vacation," and Nat related the
incident of the day.

The boy's liking for the water seemed to have been born in him. Soon
after his mother had died his father placed him in the care of a
family in an inland city. The child seemed to pine away, and an old
woman suggested he might want to be near the water, as his father had
followed all his life a calling that kept him aboard boats. Though he
did not believe much in that theory, Mr. Morton finally consented to
place his son to board in Chicago. Nat at once picked up and became a
strong, healthy lad.

As he grew older his father took him on short trips with him, so Nat
grew to know and love the Great Lakes, as a sailor learns to know and
love the ocean.

Soon Nat began asking questions about ships and how they were sailed.
His father was a good instructor, and between his terms at school Nat
learned much about navigation in an amateur sort of way.

Best of all he loved to stand in the pilot-house, where he was
admitted because many navigators knew and liked Mr. Morton. There the
boy learned something of the mysteries of steering a boat by the
compass and by the lights on shore. He learned navigating terms, and,
on one or two occasions, was even allowed to take the spokes of the
great wheel in his own small hands.

In this way Nat gained a good practical knowledge of boats. Then came
the sad day when he received the news of the death of his father.
Though up to that time he had lived in comparative comfort, he now
found himself very poor.

For though, as he told John Scanlon, his father had said something
about financial matters being better after the delivery of the big
load that was on the lumber barge on which he met his death, the boy