y stood Jonas, his coat off, his sandy hair in wild
confusion, his face radiant, and in his hands Little Kensington in her
nightgown.

"I knew by the row on the stairs you'd brought her home," he exclaimed,
as Little Kensington was snatched from him and Corinne was put into his
arms.

We left Jonas and Pomona to their wild delight, and I accompanied the
equally happy lady to the opera house, where I took occasion to reclaim
the wraps which we had left behind in our sudden flight.

When the police of Paris were told to give up their search for an
absconding nurse accompanied by a child, and to look for one without
such encumbrance, they found her. From this woman was obtained much of
the story I have told, and a good deal more was drawn out, little by
little, from Corinne, who took especial pleasure in telling, in brief
sentences, how she had ousted the lazy baby from the carriage, and how
she had scratched her own legs in getting in.

"What I'm proud of," said Pomona, "is that she did it all herself. It
wasn't none of your common stealin's an' findin's; an' it aint
everywhere you'll see a child that kin git itself lost back of Prince
Albert's monnyment, an' git itself found at the operer in Paris, an'
attend to both ends of the case itself. An', after all, them two high
notes of hern was more good than Perkins's Indelible Dab."

DERELICT.

A TALE OF THE WAYWARD SEA.

I.

On the 25th of May, 1887, I sat alone upon the deck of the _Sparhawk_,
a three-masted schooner, built, according to a description in the
cabin, at Sackport, Me. I was not only alone on the deck, but I was
alone on the ship. The _Sparhawk_ was a "derelict"; that is, if a
vessel with a man on board of her can be said to be totally abandoned.

I had now been on board the schooner for eight days. How long before
that she had been drifting about at the mercy of the winds and currents
I did not then know, but I discovered afterward that during a cyclone
early in April she had been abandoned by her entire crew, and had since
been reported five times to the hydrographic office of the Navy
Department in Washington, and her positions and probable courses duly
marked on the pilot chart.

She had now become one of that little fleet abandoned at sea for one
cause or another, and floating about this way and that, as the wild
winds blew or the ocean currents ran. Voyaging without purpose, as if
manned by the spirits of ignorant landsmen, sometim