board the
cutter, but though strong and hearty, I felt I was no longer fit for
sea. I found, however, on application, that I could obtain employment
as a rigger in the dockyard; and in that work I spent some years. I
took a little cottage on the hill, which I furnished by means of the
money I received from Captain Carr, and made myself perfectly
comfortable.

Directly I was settled, I started off next day for Greenwich Hospital,
for I thought that I should very likely fall in with some old shipmates
there. I went into the chapel and sat myself down--no one hindering me.
As the men were coming out when service was over, I saw before me a
tall, thin old pensioner, bending under the weight of years, and resting
on a staff as he walked before me. I came behind as he reached the open
air, and looked up in his face. It wore the same kind, benignant, mild
expression which I remembered so well in the countenance of Peter
Poplar. I waited till he got down the steps.

"Just lean on me, sir," said I. "You have carried me before now, if I
mistake not." He looked hard at my face. A tear dimmed his eye.

"Yes, yes--it's the boy himself," he whispered in a tremulous voice.
"But you are `Old Jack' now." I loved the name he gave me, and ever
since to the lads I meet and talk with I have called myself by it.

A few weeks after that, I sat by the bedside of my kind, noble old
friend--talking of that glorious eternity into which his spirit entered
before I left him.

After I had been settled for some years, I met an old shipmate, sick,
and I saw plainly dying. He had been a lad when I knew him. He had
with him a little girl, his only child, some ten years old. His wife
was dead. He had no friends. I promised as he lay on his death-bed to
take charge of the lassie. He blessed me, and died. I took her to my
cottage, and she has ever since been a comfort and a solace to me--a
daughter by adoption, if not by blood.

Not long after this event, I met my former commander in the cutter. He
asked me how I was employed. I told him as a rigger, but that I
sometimes found my strength scarcely equal to the work; but when that
failed, I was sure God would provide for me as He had always done.

He replied that he had no doubt of it--that even then there was work for
which I was well fitted ready for me--that he belonged to a society
which had been formed to distribute, at a low price, religious and other
publications among thos