y of about eight, with long
flaxen curls hardly dry from his morning bath. In the pauses of
conversation he rubbed his head with a big bath-towel. His legs
and feet were bare, and he wore only a little shirt and velveteen
breeches, with scarlet ribbons hanging untied at the knees.

"You're laughing!"

I stifled the smile.

"What were you laughing at?"

"Why, you're wrong, little man, on just one or two points," I answered
evasively.

"Which?"

"Well, about the sunshine in England. The sun is not always shining
there, by any means."

"I'm afraid you know very little about it," said the boy, shaking his
head.

"Johnny! Johnny!" a voice called down the companion-ladder at this
moment. It was followed by a thin, weary-looking man, dressed in
carpet slippers and a suit of seedy black. I guessed his age at fifty,
but suspect now that the lines about his somewhat prim mouth were
traced there by sorrows rather than by years. He bowed to me shyly,
and addressed the boy.

"Johnny, what are you doing here? in bare feet!"

"Father, here is a man who says the sun doesn't always shine in
England."

The man gave me a fleeting embarrassed glance, and echoed, as if to
shirk answering--

"In bare feet!"

"But it does, doesn't it? Tell him that it does," the child insisted.

Driven thus into a corner, the father turned his profile, avoiding my
eyes, and said dully--

"The sun is always shining in England."

"Go on, father; tell him the rest."

"--and the use of candles, except as a luxury, is consequently unknown
to the denizens of that favoured clime," he wound up, in the tone of a
man who repeats an old, old lecture.

Johnny was turning to me triumphantly, when his father caught him by
the hand and led him back to his dressing. The movement was hasty,
almost rough. I stood at the cabin-door and looked after them.

We were fellow-passengers aboard the _Midas_, a merchant barque of
near on a thousand tons, homeward bound from Cape Town; and we had
lost sight of the Table Mountain but a couple of days before. It was
the first week of the new year, and all day long a fiery sun made life
below deck insupportable. Nevertheless, though we three were the only
passengers on board, and lived constantly in sight of each other, it
was many days before I made any further acquaintance with Johnny and
his father. The sad-faced man clearly desired to avoid me, answering
my nod with a cold embarrassment, and clutching Johnny'