dry soda biscuits
for three days, and were then picked up."

"But the others, Sam?" I asked. "Were they picked up?"

"No," answered Sam with a perceptible quaver in his voice. "They were
not. The wolf, the zebras, and the asses could swim, and so could the
monkeys, and snakes, after a fashion.

"I don't know what trouble they may or may not have had with these.
What I did see, though, as I pulled stroke oar in the race with the
hippo, was the big head of the elephant showing occasionally as we rode
over the crest of a wave.

"He was waving his trunk in the air, and making for the other boat.
They were pulling as hard as we were, but to less avail. They were
overladen with men and grub. Each lift of a sea showed them nearer
together.

"Then we sank into a hollow.

"When we came up I saw nothing but that waving trunk."

THE FINISHING TOUCH

He was born with a nature as simple and primitive as the physical
conditions surrounding him, and endowed with a body so frail and
delicate that he barely survived these conditions--which were of frost,
and snow, and ice, with winter hurricanes straight from Greenland and
summer fogs fed by the Gulf Stream to breed pneumonia and kindred
diseases into stronger lungs than his.

But he survived to reach the age of eighteen, a tall, flat-chested,
weak-witted butt of the local school, who, while able to struggle along
with the ordinary studies at the foot of the class, was yet so poorly
endowed with the mathematical sense that he could only master the first
four rules of arithmetic. Fractions and decimals were unsolvable
mysteries to him. His name was Quinbey--first name John, later Jack.

He was of American birth, the only son of a fisherman, who had taken
his smack to an isolated village on the Nova Scotian coast. Here the
fisherman did well, and before the boy was half grown owned the finest
cottage in the village--which he bought cheap because it was perched on
the crest of the hill, exposed to every storm that blew, a nest that
none but a sailor could live in. With increasing prosperity he
installed a big base-burner, good for the anaemic boy, but bad for
himself.

The boy rid himself of coughs and colds; but the father, changing from
the chill and the wet of fishing to the warmth and ease of home life,
contracted pneumonia and died, leaving the boy in possession of the
house and the smack, but not enough ready money to last for a month.

Young Quinbey closed u